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GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT, 



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GEOEGE AUGUSTUS SALA, 

AUTHOR OF "A JOURNEY DUE NORTH," "TWICE ROUND THE CLOCK,' 
" THE BADDINGTON PEERAGE," ETC. 



LONDON: 
CHAPMAN & HALL, 193 PICCADILLY. 

1859. 



5% Ot 3 



LONDON : PRINTED BY "WILLI A Hi CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE 

I. THE KEY OF THE STREET . i 

II. GETTING UP A PANTOMIME . . 16 

III. DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY . . 32 

IV. JACK ALIVE IN LONDON . . . 41 
V. THINGS DEPARTED . . . .56 

VI. PHASES OF < PUBLIC ' LIFE. — I. . . 66 

VII. PHASES OF * PUBLIC ' LIFE. —II. . .80 

VIII. PHASES OF ' PUBLIC ' LIFE. — III. . . 92 

IX. POWDER DICK AND HIS TRAIN . .102 

X. MY SWAN . . . . 114 

XI. THE BOTTLE OF HAY . . . .122 

XII. CITY SPECTRES . . . . 135 

, XIII. HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY . . .145 

XIV. THE SECRETS OF THE GAS • . 156 

XV. PERFIDIOUS PATMOS . . . 163 

XVI. LEICESTER SQUARE . . . 173 

XVII. DAYBREAK . „ . . .184 

XVIII. ARCADIA . . . . 192 

XIX. TRAVELS IN CAWDOR STREET . . . 206 

XX. HOUSES TO LET . . . . 216 

XXI. TATTYBOYS RENTS . . . .231 



IV CONTENTS. 

CHAP. PACE 

XXII. TATTFBOYS RENTERS . . . 245 

XXIII. DOWN WII1TECHAPEL WAY . . . 256 

XXIV. THE MUSICAL WORLD . . . 269 
XXY. MUSIC IN PAVING-STONES . . . 283 

XXVI. A LITTLE MORE HARMONY . . 297 
XXVII. GIBBET STREET .... 307 

XXVIII. STROLLERS AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY . . 315 

XXIX. CHEERILY, CHEERILY ! . " . .330 

XXX. HOW I WENT TO SEA . . . 345 

XXXI. FASHION . ... . . 360 

XXXII. YELLOWKNIGHTS . . «. „ 367 

XXXIII. THE SPORTING WORLD . . . 374 

XXXIV. WHERE ARE THEY? ... 390 



GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 



THE KEY OF THE STEEET. 



& 



It is commonly asserted, and as commonly believed, that there 
are seventy thousand persons in London who rise every morn- 
ing without the slightest knowledge as to where they shall 
lay their heads at night. However the number may be over 
or understated, it is very certain that a vast quantity of people 
are daily in the above-mentioned uncertainty regarding sleep- 
ing accommodation, and that when night approaches, a great 
majority solve the problem in a somewhat (to themselves) 
disagreeable manner, by not going to bed at all. 

People who stop up, or out all night, may be divided into 
three classes : — First, editors, bakers, market-gardeners, and 
all those who are kept out of their beds by business. Secondly, 
gentlemen and 'gents,' anxious to cultivate a knowledge of 
the ' lark' species, or intent on the navigation of the ' spree.' 
Thirdly, and lastly, those ladies and gentlemen who do not go 
to bed, for the very simple reason that they have no beds to 
go to. 

The members of this last class — a very numerous one — are 
said, facetiously, to possess ' the key of the street.' And a 
remarkably disagreeable key it is. It will unlock for you all 
manner of caskets you would fain know nothing about. It is 
the ' open sesame ' to dens you never saw before, and would 
much rather never see again, — a key to knowledge which 
should surely make the learner a sadder man, if it make him 
not a wiser one. 

Come with me, luxuriant tenant of heavy-draped four-poster 
— basker on feather-bed, and nestler in lawn sheets. Come 

B 



A GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

with me, comfortable civic "bolster-presser — snug woollen- 
nightcap-wearer. Come with me, even workman, labourer, 
peasant — sleeper on narrow pallet — though your mattress be 
hard, and your rug coarse. Leave your bed — bad as it may 
be — and gaze on those who have no beds at all. Follow with me 
the veins and arteries of this huge giant that Kes a-sleeping. 
Listen while with ' the key of the street ' I unlock the stony 
coffer, and bring forth the book, and from the macadamised 
page read forth the lore of midnight London Life. 

I have no bed to-night. Why, it matters not. Perhaps 
I have lost my latch-key, — perhaps I never had one ; yet am 
fearful of knocking up my landlady after midnight. Perhaps 
I have a caprice — a fancy — for stopping up all night. At 
all events, I have no bed ; and, saving ninepence (sixpence 
in silver and threepence in coppers), no money. I must walk 
the streets all night ; for I cannot, look you, get anything in 
the shape of a bed for less than a shilling. Coffee-houses, 
into which — seduced by their cheap appearance — I have 
entered, and where I have humbly sought a lodging, laugh 
my ninepence to scorn. They demand impossible eighteen- 
pences — unattainable shillings. There is clearly no bed for 
me. 

It is midnight — so the clanging tongue of St. Dunstan's 
tells me — as I stand thus, bedless, at Temple Bar. I have 
walked a good deal during the day, and have an uncomfort- 
able sensation in my feet, suggesting the idea that the soles of 
my boots are made of roasted brick-bats. I am thirsty, too 
(it is July, and sultry), and, just as the last chime of St. 
Dunstan's is heard, I have half a pint of porter — and a ninth 
part of my ninepence is gone from me for ever. The public- 
house where I have it (or rather the beer-shop, for it is an 
establishment of the ' glass of ale and sandwich ' description) 
is an early-closing one ; and the proprietor, as he serves me, 
yawningly orders the pot-boy to put up the shutters, for he is 
6 off to bed.' Happy proprietor ! There is a bristly-bearded 
tailor, too, very beery, having his last pint, who utters a 
similar somniferous intention. He calls it c Bedfordshire/ 
Thrice happy tailor ! 

I envy him fiercely, as he goes out, though, God wot, his 
bedchamber may be but a squalid attic, and his bed a tattered 
hop-sack, with a slop great-coat — from the emporium of Messrs. 
Melchisedech and Son, and which he has been working at all 
day — for a coverlid. I envy his children (I am sure he has a 



THE KEY OF THE STKEET. 3 

callow, ragged brood of them), for they have at least some- 
where to sleep, — I havn't. 

I watch, with a species of lazy curiosity, the whole process 
of closing the ' Original Burton Ale House,' from the sudden 
shooting up of the shutters, through the area grating, like 
gigantic Jacks-in-a-box, to the final adjustment of screws and 
iron nuts. Then I bend my steps westward, and at the corner 
of Wellington Street stop to contemplate a cab-stand. 

Cudgel thyself, weary Brain,— exhaust thyself, Invention, — 
torture thyself, Ingenuity — all, and in vain, for the miserable 
acquisition of six feet of mattress and a blanket ! 

Had I the delightful impudence, now — the calm audacity — 
of my friend, Bolt, I should not be five minutes without a bed. 
Bolt, I verily believe, would not have the slightest hesitation 
in walking into the grandest hotel in Albemarle Street or 
Jermyn Street, asking for supper and a bootjack, having his 
bed warmed, and would trust to Providence and his happy 
knack of falling, like a cat, on all-fours, for deliverance in the 
morning. I could as soon imitate Bolt as I could dance on the 
tight-rope. Spunge again, that stern Jeremy Diddler, who 
always bullies you when you relieve him, and whose request 
for the loan of half a crown is more like a threat than a peti- 
tion — Spunge, I say, would make a violent irruption into a 
friend's room ; and, if he did not turn him out of his bed, 
would at least take possession of his sofa and his great-coats 
for the night, and impetuously demand breakfast in the morn- 
ing. If I were only Spunge, now ! 

What am I to do ? It is just a quarter past twelve ; how 
am I to walk about till noon to-morrow ? Suppose I walk 
three miles an hour, am I to walk thirty-five miles in these 
fearful London streets ? Suppose it rains, can I stand under 
an archway for twelve hours ? 

I have heard of the dark arches of the Adelphi, and of 
houseless vagrants crouching there by night. But, then, I 
have read that police constables are nightly enjoined by their 
inspectors to route out these vagrants, and drive them from 
their squalid refuge. Then there are the dry arches of 
Waterloo Bridge, and the railway arches ; but I abandon the 
idea of seeking refuge there, for I am naturally timorous, and I 
can't help thinking of chloroform and life-preservers in con- 
nexion with them. Though I have little to be robbed of, 
Heaven knows ! 

I have heard, too, of tramps' lodging-houses, and of the 

b 2 



4 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

' twopenny rope.' I am not prepared to state that I would 
not avail myself of that species of accommodation, for I am 
getting terribly tired and foot-sore. But I don't know where 
to seek for it, and I am ashamed to ask. 

I would give something to lie down, too. I wonder whether 
that cabman would think it beneath his dignity to accept a pot 
of porter, and allow me to repose in his vehicle till he got a 
fare ? I know some cabmen never obtain one during the night, 
and I could snooze comfortably in hackney-carriage two thou- 
sand and twenty-two. But I cannot form a favourable opinion 
of the driver, who is discussing beer and democratic politics 
with the waterman ; and neither he nor any of his brother 
Jehus, indeed, seem at all the persons to ask a favour of. 

It is Opera night, as I learn from the accidentally-heard 
remark of a passing policeman. To watch the departing 
equipages will, surely, help to pass the time on bravely, and 
with something almost like hope, I stroll to Govent Garden 
Theatre. 

I am in the thick of it at once. Such a scrambling, push- 
ing, jostling, and shouting ! Such pawing of spirited horses, 
and objurgations of excited policemen ! Now, Mrs. Fitz- 
somebody's carriage stops the way ; and now, Mr. Smith, of 
the Stock Exchange, with two ladies on each arm, stands 
bewildered in a chaos of carriages, helplessly ejaculating 
1 Cab.' Now, is there a playful episode in the shape of a 
policeman dodging a pickpocket among horses' heads, and 
under wheels ; and now, a pitiable one, in the person of an 
elderly maiden lady, who has lost her party in the crush, and 
her shoe in the mud, and is hopping about the piazza like an 
agonised sparrow. It is all over soon, however. The car- 
riages rattle, and the cabs lumber away. The great city 
people, lords of Lombard Street, and kaisers of Cornhill, depart 
in gorgeous chariots, emblazoned in front and at the back. 
The dukes and marquises, and people of that sort, glide away 
in tiny broughams, and infinitesimal clarences. The highest 
personage of the land drives off in a plain chariot, with two 
servants in plain black, more like a doctor (as I hear a gentle- 
man from the country near me indignantly exclaim) than a 
Queen. Mr. Smith has found his party, and the sparrow-like 
lady her shoe, by this time. Nearly everybody is gone. Stay, 
the gentleman who thinks it a ' genteel ' thing to go to the 
Opera, appears on the threshold carefully adjusting his white 
neckcloth with the huge bow, and donning a garment some- 



THE KEY OF THE STREET. 

thing between a smockfrock and a horsecloth, which is called, 
I believe, the ' Opera envelope.' He will walk home to 
Camberwell with his lorgnette case in his hand, and in white 
kid gloves, to let everybody know where he has been. The 
policemen and the night wanderers will be edified, no doubt. 
Following him comes the habitue, who is a lover of music, I 
am sure. He puts his gloves, neatly folded, into his breast- 
pocket, stows away his opera-glass, and buttons his coat. 
Then he goes quietly over to the Albion, where I watch him 
gravely disposing of a pint of stout at the bar. He is ten to 
one a gentleman : and I am sure he is a sensible man. And 
now all. horse and foot, are departed ; the heavy portals are 
closed, and the Royal Italian Opera is left to the fireman, to 
darkness, and to me. 

The bed question has enjoyed a temporary respite while 
these proceedings are taking place. Its discussion is postponed 
still further by the amusement and instruction I derive from 
watching the performances in the ham and beef shop at the 
corner of Bow Street. Here are crowds of customers, hot and 
hungry from the Lyceum or Drury Lane, and clamorous for 
sandwiches. Ham sandwiches, beef sandwiches, German 
sausage sandwiches — legions of sandwiches are cut and con- 
sumed. The cry is c mustard,' and anon the coppers rattle, 
and payment is tendered and change given. Then come the 
people who carry home half a pound of ' cold round ' or three- 
pennyworth of ' brisket ;' I scrutinise them, their purchases, 
and their money. I watch the scale with rapt attention, and 
wait with trembling eagerness the terrific combat between that 
last piece of fat and the half ounce weight. The half ounce 
has it ; and the beef merchant gives the meat a satisfied slap 
with the back of his knife, and rattles the price triumphantly. 
I have been so intent on all this, that I have taken no heed of 
time as yet ; so, when custom begins to flag, glancing at the 
clock, I am agreeably surprised to find it is ten minutes past one. 

A weary waste of hours yet to traverse — the silence of the 
night season yet to endure. There are many abroad still ; 
but the reputable wayfarers drop off gradually, and the disre- 
putable ones increase with alarming rapidity. The great- 
coated policeman, the shivering Irish prowlers, and some 
fleeting shadows that seem to be of women, have taken undis- 
puted possession of Bow Street and Long Acre ; and but for a 
sprinkling of young thieves, and a few tipsy bricklayers, they 
would have it all their own way in Drury Lane. 



6 GASLIGHT AIs T D DAYLIGHT. 

I have wandered into this last-named unsavoury thorough- 
fare, and stand disconsolately surveying its aspect. And it 
strikes me now, that it is eminently distinguished for its street- 
corners. There is scarcely a soul to be seen in the street 
itself, but all the corners have posts, and nearly all the posts 
are garnished with leaning figures — now two stalwart police- 
men holding municipal converse — now two women, God help 
them ! — now a knot of lads with pale faces, long greasy hair, 
and short pipes. Thieves, my friend — (if I had a ^friend) — 
unmistakeable thieves. 

There are no professional beggars about — what on earth is 
there for them to be out for ! The beggees are gone home to 
their suppers and their beds, and the beggars are gone home 
to their suppers and their beds. They have all got beds, 
bless you ! 

Some of the doorways have heaps of something huddled up 
within them ; and ever and anon a policeman will come and 
stir the something up with his truncheon, or more probably 
with his boot. Then you will see a chaotic movement of legs 
and arms, and hear a fretful crooning with an Irish accent. 
Should the guardian of the night insist in the enforcement of 
his ' move on ' decree — the legs and arms will stagger a few 
paces onward, and as soon as the policeman's back is turned, 
slink into another doorway — to be routed out perchance 
again in another quarter of an hour by another truncheon, or 
another boot. 

Half-past one by the clock of St. Mary-le -Strand, and I am 
in Charles Street, Drury Lane. It is a very dirty little street 
this — full worthy, I take it, to challenge competition with 
Church Lane or Buckeridge Street. A feeling, however, 
indefinable, but strong, prompts me to pursue its foul and 
devious course for some score of yards. Then I stop. 

' Lodgings for single men at fourpence per night.' This 
agreeable distich greets me, pictured on the panes of a 
window, behind which a light is burning. I step into the 
road to have a good look at the establishment that proffers the 
invitation. It is a villanous ramshackle house — a horrible 
cut-throat-looking den, to be sure : — but then the fourpence ! 
Think of that, Master Brooke ! There is a profusion of hand- 
bills plastered on the door-jambs, which I can read by the 
light of a gas-lamp a few paces off. I decipher a flattering 
legend of separate beds, every convenience for cooking, and 
hot water always ready. I am informed that this is the real 



THE KEY OF THE STREET. 7 

model lodging-liouse ; and I read, moreover, some derisive 
couplets relative to the Great Spitalfields Lodging-House, 
which is styled a ' Bastile !' I begin fingering, involuntarily, 
the eightpence in my pocket. Heaven knows what uncouth 
company I may fall into ; but then, fourpence ! and my feet 
are so tired. Jacta est dlea, I will have fourpenn'orth. 

You have heard ere now what the ' deputy ' of a tramps' 
lodging-house is like. I am received by the deputy — a short- 
haired low-browed stunted lout, sometimes, it is said, not over 
courteous to inquisitive strangers. As, however, I come to 
sleep, and not to inspect, I am not abused, but merely 
inspected and admitted. I am informed that, with the addi- 
tion my company will make, the establishment is full. I pay 
my fourpence, without the performance of which ceremony I 
do not get beyond the filthy entrance passage. Then, the 
£ deputy ' bars the door, and, brandishing an iron candlestick 
as though it were an antique mace, bids me follow him. 

What makes me, when we have ascended the rotten stair- 
case, when I have entered my bedchamber — when the 
' deputy ' has even bid me a wolfish good-night — what makes 
me rush down stairs, and, bursting through the passage, beg 
him to let me out for Heaven's sake ? What makes me, when 
the ' deputy ' has unbarred the door, and bade me go out, and 
be somethiug'd, and has not given me back my fourpence, 
stand sick and stupified in the street, till I wake up to a 
disgusted consciousness in being nearly knocked down by a 
group of staggering roysterers, howling out a drunken chorus? 

It was not the hang-dog look of the ' deputy,' or the cut- 
throat appearance of the house. It was not even the aspect 
of the score or more ragged wretches who were to be my 
sleeping companions. It was, in plain English, the smell of 
the bugs. Ugh! — the place was alive with them. They 
crawled on the floor — they dropped from the ceiling — they 
ran mad races on the walls ! Give me the key of the street, 
and let me wander forth again. 

I have not got further than Broad Street, St. Giles's, before 
I begin to think that I have been slightly hasty. I feel so 
tired, so worn, so full of sleep now, that I can't help the 
thought that I might have fallen off into heavy sleep yonder 
and that the havoc committed by the bugs on my carcase 
might have been borne unfelt. It is too late now. The 
fourpence are departed, and I dare not face the deputy 
again. 



8 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Two in the morning, and still black, thick, impervious' 
night, as I turn into Oxford Street, by Meux's Brewery. The 
flitting shadows that seemed to be of women, have grown 
scarcer. A quarter past two, and I have gained the Eegent 
Circus, and can take my choice, either for a stroll in the 
neighbourhood of the Eegent' s Park, or a quiet lounge in the 
district of the Clubs. Quite an epicure ! I choose the Clubs, 
and shamble down Eegent Street, towards Piccadilly. 

I feel myself slowly, but surely, becoming more of a regular 
night skulker — a houseless, hopeless, vagrant, every moment* 
I feel my feet shuffle, my shoulders rise towards my ears ; 
my head goes on one side ; I hold my hands in a crouching" 
position before me ; I no longer walk, I prowl. Though it is 
July, I shiver. As I stand at the corner of Conduit Street 
(all night skulkers affect corners), a passing figure, in satin 
and black lace, flings me a penny. How does the phantom 
know^ that I have the key of the streets ? I am not in rags, 
and yet my plight must be evident. So I take the penny. 

Where are the policemen, I wonder ? I am walking in the 
centre of the road, yet, from end to end of the magnificent 
street, I cannot see a single soul. Stay, here is one. A little 
fair-headed ruffian leaps from the shadow of Archbishop 
Tenison's Chapel. He has on a ragged pair of trousers, and 
nothing else to speak of. He vehemently demands to be 
allowed to turn head over heels three times for a penny. I 
give him the penny the phantom gave me (cheap charity!), 
and intimate that I can dispense with the tumbling. But he 
is too honest for that, and, putting the penny in his mouth, 
disappears in a series of summersaults. Then, the gas-lamps 
and I have it all to ourselves. 

Safe at the corner (corners again you see !) of what was once 
the Quadrant, where a mongrel dog joins company. I know 
he is a dog without a bed, like I am, for he has not that grave 
trot, so full of purpose, which the dog on business has. This 
dog wanders irresolutely, and makes feigned turnings up by- 
streets — returning to the main thoroughfare in a slouching, 
manner ; he ruminates over cigar-stumps and cabbage-stalks, 
which no homeward-bound dog would do. But even that dog is 
happier than I am, for he can lie down on any doorstep, and 
take his rest, and no policeman shall say him nay ; but the 
Xew Police Act won't let me do so, and says sternly that I 
must ' move on.' 

Hallo ! a rattle in the distance — nearer— nearer — louder and 



THE KEY OF THE STEEET. 9 

louder ! Now it bursts upon ray sight. A fire-engine at full 
speed ; and the street is crowded in a moment ! 

Where the people come from I don't pretend to say — but 
there they are — hundreds of them all wakeful and noisy, and 
clamorous. On goes the engine, with people hallooing, and 
following, and mingling with the night wind the dreadful cry 
of Fire. 

I follow of course. An engine at top speed is as potent a 
spell to a night prowler, as a pack of hounds in full cry is to 
a Leicestershire yeoman. Its influence is contagious too, and 
the crowd swells at every yard of distance traversed. The 
fire is in a narrow street of Soho. at a pickle-shop. It is a fierce 
one, at which I think the crowd is pleased : but then nobody 
lives in the house, at which I imagine they are slightly cha- 
grined ; for excitement, you see, at a fire is everything. En 
revanclie there are no less than three families of small children 
next door, and the crowd are hugely delighted when they are 
expeditiously brought out in their night-dresses, by the Fire- 
brigade. 

3Iore excitement ! The house on the other side has caught 
fire. The mob are # in ecstasies, and the pickpockets make a 
simultaneous onslaught on all the likely pockets near them. 
I am not pleased, but interested — highly interested. I would 
pump, but I am not strong in the arms. Those who pump, I 
observe, receive beer. 

I have been watching the blazing pile so long — basking, as 
it were, in the noise and shouting and confusion ; the hoarse 
clank of the engines — the cheering of the crowd — the dull 
roar of the fire, that the bed question has been quite in abey- 
ance, and I have forgotten all about it and the time. But 
when the fire is quenched, or at least brought under, as it is 
at last ; when the sheets of flame and sparks are succeeded by 
columns of smoke and steam ; when, as a natural consequence, 
the excitement begins to flag a little, and the pressure of the 
crowd diminishes ; then, turning away from the charred and 
gutted pickle-shop, I hear the clock of St. Anne's, Soho, strike 
four, and find that it is broad daylight. 

Four dreary hours yet to wander before a London day com- 
mences ; four weary, dismal revolutions on the clock-face, 
before the milkman makes his rounds, and I can obtain access 
to my penates, with the matutinal supply of milk ! 

To add to my discomfort and to the utter heart- weariness 
and listless misery which is creeping over me, it begins to 



10 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

rain. Not a sharp pelting shower, but a slow, monotonous, 
ill-conditioned drizzle ; damping without wetting — now delud- 
ing you into the idea that it is going to hold up, and now with 
a sudden spirt in your face, mockingly informing you that it 
has no intention of the kind. Very wretchedly indeed I 
thread the narrow little streets about Soho, meeting no one 
but a tom-cat returning from his club, and a misanthropic- 
looking policeman, who is feeling shutter-bolts and tugging 
at door-handles with a vicious aspect, as though he were dis- 
appointed that some unwary householder had not left a slight 
temptation for a sharp housebreaker. 

I meet another policeman in Golden Square, who looks 
dull ; missing, probably, the society of the functionary who 
guards the fire-escape situated in that fashionable locality, 
and who hasn't come back from the burnt pickle-shop yet. 
He honours me with a long stare as I pass him. 

' Good morning,' he says. 

I return the compliment. 

' Going home to bed ?' he asks. \ 

c Y-e-es,' I answer. 

He turns on his heels and says no more ; but, bless you ! I 
can see irony in his bull's-eye — contemptuous incredulity in 
his oil-skin cape ! It needs not the long low whistle in which 
he indulges, to tell me that he knows very well I have no bed 
to go home to". 

I sneak quietly down Sherrard Street into the Quadrant. 
I don't know why, but I begin to be afraid of policemen. I 
never transgressed the law — yet I avoid the ' force.' The 
sound of their heavy boot-heels disquiets me. One of them 
stands at the door of Messrs. Swan and Edgar's, and to 
avoid him I actually abandon a resolution I had formed of 
walking up Eegent Street, and turn down the Haymarket 
instead. 

There are three choice spirits who evidently have got beds 
to go to, though they are somewhat tardy in seeking them. I 
can tell that they have latch-keys, by their determined air — 
their bold and confident speech. ' They have just turned, or 
have been turned out from an oyster-room, They are all 
three very drunk, have on each other's hats, and one of them 
has a quantity of dressed lobster in his cravat. 

These promising gentlemen are ' out on the spree.' The 
doors of the flash public-houses and oyster-rooms are letting 
out similar detachments of choice spirits all down the Hay- 



THE KEY OF THE STREET. 11. 

market ; some of a most patrician sort, with, most fierce mou- 
stachios and whiskers ; whom I think I have seen before, and 
whom I may very probably see again, in jackboots and golden 
aiguillettes, prancing on huge black horses by the side of Her 
Majesty's carriage, going to open Parliament. The gentlemen 
or rather gents on the ' spree ' call this ' life. 5 They will 
probably sleep in the station-house this morning, and will be 
fined various sums for riotous conduct. They will get drunk, 
I dare say, three hundred times in the course of a year, for 
about three years. In the last-mentioned space of time they 
will bonnet many dozen policemen, break some hundreds of 
gas-lamps, have some hundreds of ' larks,' and scores of 
•rows.' They will go to Epsom by the rail, and create dis- 
turbances on the course, and among the ' sticks.' and ' Aunt 
Sallies.' They will frequent the Aclelphi at half-price, and 
haunt night-houses afterwards. They will spend their salaries 
in debauchery, and obtain fresh supplies of money from bill- 
discounters, and be swindled out of it by the proprietors of 
gambling-houses. Some day, when their health and their 
money are gone — when they are sued on all their bills, and by 
all the tradesmen they have plundered — they will be dis- 
charged from their situations, or be discarded by their friends. 
Then they will subside into Whitecross Street and the Insol- 
vent Debtors' Court — and then, God knows ! they will die 
miserably, I suppose : of delirium tremens, maybe. 

I have taken a fancy to have a stroll — save the mark ! — in 
St. James's Park, and am about to descend the huge flight of 
stone steps leading to the Mall, when I encounter a martial 
band, consisting of a grenadier in a great-coat, and holding a 
lighted lantern (it is light as noon-day), an officer in a cloak, 
and four or five more grenadiers in great-coats, looking remark- 
ably ridiculous in those hideous grey garments. As to the 
officer, he appears to regard everything with an air oft unmiti- 
gated disgust, and to look at the duty upon which he is en- 
gaged as a special bore. I regard it rather in the light of a 
farce. Yet, if I mistake not, these are ' Grand Ptounds,' or 
something of the sort. TThen the officer gets within a few 
yards of the sentinel at the Duke of York's Column he shouts 
out some unintelligible question, to which the bearer of Brown 
Bess gives a responsive, but as unintelligible howl. Then the 
foremost grenadier plays in an imbecile manner with his 
lantern, like King Lear with his straw, and the officer flourishes 
his sword ; and ' Grand Piounds ' are over, so far as the Duke 



12 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

of York is concerned, I suppose; for the whole party trot 
gravely down Pall Mall, towards the Duchess of Kent's. 

I leave them to their devices, and saunter moodily into the 
Mall. It is but a quarter to five, now ; and I am so jaded 
and tired that I can scarcely drag one foot after another. The 
rain has ceased ; but the morning air is raw and cold ; and the 
rawness clings, as it were, to the marrow of my bones. My 
hair is wet, and falls in draggled hanks on my cheeks. My feet 
seem to have grown preposterously large, and my boots so pre- 
posterously small. I wish I were a dog or a dormouse ! I long 
for a haystack, or a heap of sacks, or anything. I even think I 
could find repose on one of those terrible inclined planes which 
you see tilted towards you through the window of the Morgue at 
Paris. I have a good mind to smash a lamp, and be taken to 
the station-house. I have a good mind to throw myself over 
Westminster Bridge. I suppose I am afraid ; for I don't do either. 

Seeing a bench under a tree, I fling myself thereon ; and, 
hard and full of knots and bumps as the seat is, roll myself 
into a species of ball, and strive to go to sleep. But oh, vain 
delusion ! I am horribly, excruciatingly wakeful. To make 
the matter worse, I rise, and take a turn or two — then I feel as 
though I could sleep standing ; but availing myself of what I 
consider a favourably drowsy moment, I cast myself on the 
bench again, and find myself as wakeful as before ! 

There is a young vagrant — a tramp of some eighteen sum- 
mers — sitting beside me — fast asleep, and snoring with pro- 
voking pertinacity. He is half naked, and has neither shoes 
nor stockings. Yet he sleeps, and very soundly too, to all ap- 
pearance. As the loud-sounding Horse-Guards clock strikes 
five, he wakes, eyes me for a moment, and muttering * hard 
lines, mate,' turns to sleep again. In the mysterious free- 
masonry of misery, he calls me ' mate.' I suppose, eventually 
that I catch from him some portion of his vagrant acquire- 
ment of somnolence under difficulties, for, after writhing and 
turning on the comfortless wooden seat till every bone and 
muscle are sore, I fall into a deep, deep sleep — so deep it seems 
like death. 

So deep that I don't hear the quarters striking of that nui- 
sance to Park-sleepers, the Horse-Guards clock — and rise only, 
suddenly en sursaut, as six o'clock strikes. My vagrant friend 
has departed, and being apprehensive myself of cross examina- 
tion from an approaching policeman (not knowing, in fact, what 
hideous crime sleeping in St. James's Park might be) I also 



THE KEY OF THE STREET. 13 

withdrew, feeling very fagged and footsore — yet slightly 
refreshed by the hour's nap I have had. I pass the stands 
where the cows are milked, and curds and whey dispensed, on 
summer evenings ; and enter Charing Cross by the long Spring 
Garden passage. 

I have been apprised several times during the night that 
this was a market-morning in Covent Garden. I have seen 
waggons, surmounted by enormous mountains of vegetable- 
baskets, wending their way through the silent streets. I have 
been met by the early costermongers in their donkey-carts, 
and chaffed by the costerboys on my forlorn appearance. But 
I have reserved Covent Garden as a bonne louche — a wind-up to 
my pilgrimage ; for I have heard and read how fertile is the 
market in question in subjects of amusement and contempla- 
tion. 

I confess that I am disappointed. Covent Garden seems to 
me to be but one great accumulation of cabbages. I am 
pelted with these vegetables as they are thrown from the lofty 
summits of piled waggons to costermongers standing at the 
base. I stumble among them as I walk ; in short, above, 
below, on either side, cabbages preponderate. 

I dare say, had I patience, that I should see a great deal 
more ; but I am dazed with cabbages, and jostled to and fro, 
and ; danged ' dreadfully by rade market-gardeners — so I 
eschew the market, and creep round the piazza. 

I meet my vagrant friend of the Park here, who is having a 
cheap and nutritious breakfast at a coffee-stall. The stall 
itself is a nondescript species of edifice — something between 
a gipsy's tent and a watchman's box ; while, to carry out the 
comparison, as it were, the lady who serves out the coffee very 
much resembles a gipsy in person, and is clad in a decided 
watchman's coat. The aromatic beverage (if I may be allowed 
to give that name to the compound of burnt beans, roasted 
horse-liver, and refuse chicory, of which the ' coffee ' is com- 
posed) is poured, boiling hot, from a very cabalistic-looking 
cauldron into a whole regiment of cups and saucers standing 
near ; while, for more solid refection, the cups are flanked by 
plates bearing massive piles of thick bread and butter, and an 
equivocal substance, called ' cake.' Besides my friend the 
vagrant, two coster-lads are partaking of the hospitalities of 
the cafe ; and a huge gardener, straddling over a pile of 
potato-sacks, hard by, has provided himself with bread and 
butter and coffee, from the same establishment, and is con- 



14 GASLIGHT AlsD DAYLIGHT. 

sinning them with, such avidity that the tears start from his 
eyes at every gulp. 

I have, meanwhile, remembered the existence of a certain 
fourpenny-piece in my pocket, and have been twice or thrice 
tempted to expend it. Yet, on reflection, I deem it better to 
purchase with it a regular breakfast, and to repair to a legiti- 
mate coffee-shop. The day is by this time getting rapidly on, 
and something of the roar of London begins to be heard in 
earnest. The dull murmur of wheels has never ceased, indeed, 
the whole night through ; but now, laden cabs come tearing 
past on their way to the railway station. The night policemen 
gradually disappear, and sleepy potboys now gradually 
appear, yawning at the doors of public-houses — sleepy wait- 
resses at the doors of coffee-houses and reading-rooms. There 
have been both public-houses and coffee-shops open, however, 
the whole night. The ' Mohawks' Arms' in the market never 
closes. Young Lord Stultus, with Captain Asinus of the 
Heavies, endeavoured to turn on all the taps there at four 
o'clock this morning, but at the earnest desire of Frume, the 
landlord, desisted : and subsequently subsided into a chivalrous 
offer of standing glasses of ' Old Tom ' all round, which was as 
chivalrously accepted. As the ' all round ' comprised some 
thirty ladies and gentlemen, Frunie made a very good thing 
of it ; and, like a prudent tradesman as he is, he still further 
acted on the golden opportunity, by giving all those members 
of the company (about three-fourths) who were drunk, glasses 
of water instead of gin ; which operation contributed to dis- 
courage intemperance, and improve his own exchequer in a 
very signal and efficacious manner. As with the ' Mohawks* 
Arms,' so with the c Turpin's Head/ the great market- 
gardeners' house, and the ' Pipe and Horse Collar, 5 frequented 
by the night cabmen — to say nothing of that remarkably snug 
little house- near Drury Lane, ' The Blue Bludgeon,' which is 
well known to be the rendezvous of the famous Tom Thug 
and his gang, whose achievements in the strangling line, by 
means of a silk handkerchief and a life-preserver, used 
tourniquet fashion, were so generally admired by the consistent 
advocates of the ticket-of-leave system. I peep into some of 
these noted hostelries as I saunter about. They begin to 
grow rather quiet and demure as the day advances, and will 
be till midnight, indeed, very dull and drowsy pothouses, as 
times go. They don't light up to life, and jollity, and robbery, 
and violence, before the small hours. 



THE KEY OF THE STREET. 15 

So with the coffee-shops. The one I enter, to invest my 
fourpence in a breakfast of coffee and bread and butter, has 
been open all night likewise ; but the. sole occupants now are 
a dirty waiter, in a pitiable state of drowsiness, and half a 
dozen homeless wretches who have earned the privilege of 
sitting down at the filthy tables by the purchase of a cup of 
coffee, and, with their heads on their hands, are snatching 
furtive naps, cut short — too short, alas!-— by the pokes and 
4 Wake up, there !' of the waiter. It is apparently his cohsigne 
to allow no sleeping. 

I sit down here, and endeavour to keep myself awake over 
the columns of the ' Sun ' newspaper of last Tuesday week — 
unsuccessfully, however. I am so jaded and weary, so dog- 
tired and utterly worn out, that I fall off again to sleep ; and 
whether it is that the waiter has gone to sleep too, or that 
the expenditure of fourpence secures exemption for me, I am 
allowed to slumber. 

I dream this time. A dreadful vision it is, of bugs, and 
cabbages, and tramping soldiers, and anon of the fire at the 
pickle-shop. As I wake, and find, to my great joy, that it is 
ten minutes past eight o'clock, a ragged little news-boy brings 
in a damp copy of the ' Times,' and I see half a column in 
that journal headed c Dreadful Conflagration in Soho/ 

Were I not so tired, I should moralize over this, no doubt ; 
but there are now but two things in my mind — two things in 
the world for me — home and bed. Eight o'clock restores these 
both to me — so cruelly deprived of them for so long a time. 
So, just as London — work- away, steady-going London — begins 
to bestir itself, I hurry across the Strand, cross the shadow of 
the first omnibus going towards the Bank ; and, as I sink be- 
tween the sheets of my bed, resign the key of the street into 
the hands of its proper custodian, whoever he may be — and, 
whoever he may be, I don't envy him. 



16 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT 



II. 

GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 



Christmas is coming. Cold weather, snow in the streets, 
mince-pies, and our little boys and girls home for the holidays. 
Kind-hearted people's donations for the poor-boxes. Turkeys 
from the country ; Goose Clubs in town ; plums and candied 
citron in the windows of the grocers' shops ; hot elder wine ; 
snap-dragon ; hunt the slipper ; and the butchers' and bakers' 
quarterly bills. The great Anniversary of Humanity gives 
signs of its approach, and with it the joy fulness, and unbend- 
ing, and unstarching of white neckcloths, and unaffected 
charity, and genial hand-shaking and good fellowship, which, 
once a year at least, dispel the fog of caste and prejudice in 
this land of England. Christmas is coming, and, in his jovial 
train, come also the Pantomimes. 

Goodness ! though we know their stories all by heart, how 
we love those same Pantomimes still ! Though we have seen 
the same Clowns steal the same sausages, and have been asked 
by the Pantaloon ' how we were to-morrow ?' for years and 
years, how we delight in the same Clown, and Pantaloon still ! 
There can't be anything aesthetic in a pantomime — it must be 
deficient in the ' unities ;' it has no 4 epopoea,' or anything 
in the shape of dramatic property, connected with it : yet it 
must have something good about it to make us roar at the old, 
old jokes, and wonder at the old tricks, and be delighted with 
the old spangled fairies, and coloured fires. Perhaps there 
may be something in the festive season, something contagious 
in the wintry jollity of the year, that causes us, churchwardens, 
householders, hard men of business, that we umy be, to forget 
parochial squabbles, taxes and water-rates, discount and agio- 
tage, for hours, and enter, heart and soul, into participation 
and appreciation of the mysteries of ' Harlequin Fee-fo-fum ; 
or the Enchanted Fairy of the Island of Abracadabra.' Pos- 
sibly there may be something in the shrill laughter, the 
ecstatic hand-clapping, the shouts of triumphant laughter of 
the little children, yonder. It may be, after all, that the 
sausages and the spangles, the tricks and coloured fires of 
Harlequin Fee-fo-fum may strike some long-forgotten chords ; 
rummage up long-hidden sympathies ; wake up kindly feel- 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME; 17 

ings and remembrances of things that were, ere parochial 
squabbles, water-rates, and discount had being : when we too 
were little children : when our jackets buttoned over our 
trousers, and we wore frills round our necks, and long blue 
sashes round our waists. Else why should something like a 
wateriness in the eye. and a huskiness in the throat (not sor- 
rowful, though) come over us, amid the most excruciatingly 
comic portion of the ' comic business ?' Else why should the 
lights, and the music, the children's laughter, and the spangled 
fairies conjure up that mind-picture, half dim and half distinct, 
of our Christmasses years ago ; of ; Magnall's Questions,' and 
emancipation from the cane of grandmamma, who always kept 
sweetstuff in her pockets : of Uncle William, who was never 
without a store of half-crowns wherewith to ' tip' us ; of poor 
Sister Gussey, who died ; of the childish joys and griefs, the 
hopes and fears of Christmas, in the year eighteen hundred 

and : never mind how many. 

Hip, hip, hip ! for the Pantomime, however ! Exultingly 
watch the Clown through his nefarious career ; roar at Jack- 
pudding tumbling ; admire the paint on his face : marvel at 
the ' halls of splendour ' and ' glittering coral caves of the 
Genius of the Sea,' till midnight comes, and the green baize 
curtain rolls slowly down, and brown holland draperies cover 
the ormolu decorations of the boxes. Then, if you can spare 
half an hour, send the little children home to Brompton with 
the best of governesses, and tarry awhile with me while I dis- 
course of what goes on behind that same green curtain, of what 
has gone on, before the Clown could steal his sausages, or the 
spangled Fairy change an oak into a magic temple, or the 
coloured fires light up the l Home of Beauty in the Lake of 
the Silver Swans.' Let me, as briefly and succinctly as I can, 
endeavour to give you an idea of the immense labour, and 
industry, and perseverance — of the nice ingenuity, and patient 
mechanical skill — of the various knowledge, necessary, nay, 
indispensable — ere Harlequin Fee-fo-fum can be put upon the 
stage ; ere the green baize can rise, disclosing the coral caves 
of the Genius of the Sea. Let us put on the cap of Fortimio, 
and the stilts of Asmodeus : let us go back to when the pan- 
tomime was but an embryo of comicality, and, in its 2^ r °g ress 
towards the glory of full-blown 'pantomime-hood, watch the 
labours of the Ants behind the Baize — ants, without exaggera- 
tion ; for, if ever there was a human ant-hill, the working 
department of a theatre is something of that sort. 

c 



18 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

And mere amusement — your mere enlightenment on a sub- 
ject, of which my readers may possibly be ignorant, are not 
the sole objects I have in view. I do honestly think that the 
theatrical profession and its professors are somewhat calum- 
niated ; that people are rather too apt to call theatres sinks of 
iniquity and dens of depravity, and to set down all actors as a 
species of diverting vagabonds, who have acquired a know- 
ledge of their calling without study, and exercise it without 
labour. I imagine, that if a little more were known of how 
hard-working, industrious, and persevering theatricals, as a 
body, generally are, — of what has to be done behind the 
scenes of a theatre, and how it is done for our amusement, — 
we should look upon the drama with a more favourable 
eye, and look upon even poor Jack-pudding (when he has 
w r ashed the paint off his face) with a little more charity and 
forbearance. 

Fortunio-capped, then, we stand in the green-room of the 
Theatre Koyal, Hatton Garden, one dark November morning, 
while the stage-manager reads the manuscript of the opening 
to the new grand pantomime of Harlequin Fee-fo-fum. The 
dramatic performers — the pantomimists are not present at this 
reading, the lecture being preliminary, and intended for the 
sole behoof of the working ants of the theatrical ant-hill — the 
fighting ants will have another reading to themselves. This 
morning are assembled the scene-painter, an individual be- 
spattered from head to foot with splashes of various colours, 
attired in a painted, ragged blouse, a battered cap, and slip- 
shod slippers. You would be rather surprised to see him turn 
out, when his work is over, dressed like a gentleman (as he 
is, and an accomplished gentleman to boot). Near him is the 
property-man, also painted and bespattered, and strongly per- 
fumed with a mingled odour of glue and turpentine. Then 
there is the carpenter, who twirls a wide-awake hat between 
his fingers, and whose attire generally betrays an embroidery 
of shavings. The leader of the band is present. On the edge 
of a chair sits the author — not necessarily a seedy man, with 
long hair and a manuscript peeping out of his coat pocket, 
but a well-to-do looking gentleman, probably ; with rather a 
nervous air just now, and wincing somewhat, as the droning 
voice of the stage-manager gives utterance to his comic com- 
binations, and his creamiest jokes are met with immovable 
stolidity from the persons present. Gatch them laughing ! 
The scene-painter is thinking of ' heavy sets ' and ' cut 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 19 

■cloths,' instead of quips and conundrums. The carpenter 
cogitates on ' sinks ' and * slides,' ' strikes ' and ' pulls.' 
The property-man ponders ruefully on the immense number 
of comic masks to model, and coral branches to paint ; while 
the master and mistress of the wardrobe, whom we have 
hitherto omitted to mention, mentally cast up the number of 
ells of glazed calico, silk, satin, and velvet required. Lastly, 
enthroned in awful magnificence in some dim corner, sits the 
management — a portly, port-wine-voiced management, may 
be, with a white hat, and a double eye-glass with a broad 
ribbon. This incarnation of theatrical power throws in an 
occasional ' Good !' at which the author colours, and sings a 
mental poean, varied by an ejaculation of ' Can't be done !'— 
■at which the dramatist winces dreadfully. 

The reading over, a short, desultory conversation follows. 
It would be better, Mr. Brush, the painter, suggests, to make 
ihe first scene a ' close in,' and not a ' sink.' Mr. Tacks, the 
carpenter — machinist, we mean — intimates in a somewhat 
threatening manner, that he shall want a ' power of nails and 
screws ;' while the master of the wardrobe repudiates, with 
respectful indignation, an economical suggestion of the manage- 
ment touching the renovation of some old ballet- dresses by 
means of new spangles, and the propriety of cutting up an old 
crimson velvet curtain, used some years before, into costumes 
for the supernumeraries. As to the leader of the band, he is 
slowly humming over a very ' Little Warbler ' of popular 
airs, which he thinks he can introduce ; while the stage- 
manager, pencil in hand, fights amicably with the author as 
to the cuts necessary to make the pantomime read with greater 
smartness. All, however, agree that it will do ; and to each 
working ant is delivered a ' plot ' of what he or she has to 
manufacture by a given time (generally a month or six weeks 
from the day of reading). Mr. Brush has a ' plot ' of so many 
pairs of flats and wings, so many ' borders ' and set pieces, so 
many cloths and backings. Mr. Tacks has a similar one, as 
it is his department to prepare the canvasses and machinery 
on w r hich Mr. Brush subsequently paints. Mr. Tagg, the 
wardrobe keeper, is provided with a list of the fairies', 
demons,' kings,' guards,' and slaves' costumes he is required 
to confectiomier ; and Mr. Eosin, the leader, is presented with 
a complete copy of the pantomime itself, in order that he may 
study its principal points, and arrange characteristic music 
for it. As for poor Mr. Gorget, the property-man, he departs 

c 2 



20 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

in a state of pitiable bewilderment, holding in his hand a por- 
tentous list of properties required, from regal crowns to red- 
hot pokers. He impetuously demands how it's all to be 
done in a month. Done, it will be, notwithstanding. The 
stage-manager departs in a hurry (in which stage-managers 
generally are, twenty hours out of the twenty -four), and, en- 
trapping the Clown in the passage (who is an eccentric cha- 
racter of immense comic abilities, and distinguished for train- 
ing all sorts of animals, from the goose which folio ws him like 
a dog, to a jackass-foal which resides in his sitting-room), 
enters into an animated pantomimic conversation with him, 
discoursing especially of the immense number of 4 bits of fat * 
for him (Clown) in the pantomime. 

The author's name we need not mention ; it will appear in 
the bill, as it has appeared in (and across) many bills, stamped 
and unstamped, before. When the officials have retired, he 
remains awhile with the management — the subject of con- 
versation mainly relating to a piece of grey paper, addressed 
to Messrs. Coutts, Drummonds, or Childs. 

For the next few days, though work has not actually 
commenced in all its vigour, great preparations are made. 
Forests of timber, so to speak, are brought in at the stage 
door. Also, bales of canvas, huge quantities of stuffs for the 
wardrobe ; foil-paper, spangles and Dutch metal, generally. 
Firkins of size, and barrels of whiting, arrive for Mr. Brush ; 
hundred-weights of glue and gold-leaf for Mr. Gorget, not for- 
getting the ' power of nails and screws ' for Mr. Tacks. 
Another day, and the ants are all at work behind the baize 
for Harlequin Feefo-fum. 

Fortunio's cap will stand us in good stead again, and we 
had better attach ourselves to the skirts of the stage-manager, 
who is here, there, and everywhere, to see that the work is 
being properly proceeded with. ' The carpenters have been at 
work since six o'clock this nice wintry morning ; let us see 
how they are getting on after breakfast. 

We cross the darkened stage, and, ascending a very narrow 
staircase at the back thereof, mount into the lower range of 
' flies.' A mixture this of the between-decks of a ship, a 
rope-walk, and the old wood-work of the Chain-pier at 
Brighton. Here are windlasses, capstans, ropes, cables, 
chains, pulleys innumerable. Take care ! or you will stumble 
across the species of winnowing -machine, used to imitate the 
noise of wind, and which is close to the large sheet of copper 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 21 

which makes the thunder. The tin cylinder, filled with peas, 
used for rain and hail, is down stairs : but you may see the 
wires, or ' travellers,' used. by 'flying fairies.' and the huge 
counterweights and lines which work the curtain and act- 
drop. Up then, again, by a ladder, into range of flies, No. 2, 
where there are more pulleys, windlasses, and counterweights, 
with bridges crossing the stage, and lines working the 
borders, and gas-pipes, with coloured screens, called 
i mediums,' which are used to throw a lurid light of a 
moonlight on scenes of battles or conflagrations, where the 
employment of coloured fires is not desirable. Another ladder 
(a rope one this time) has still to be climbed : and now we 
find ourselves close to the roof of the theatre, and in the 
Carpenters' Shop. 

Such a noise of sawing and chopping, hammering and 
chiselling ! The shop is a large one, its size corresponding to 
the area of the stage beneath. Twenty or thirty men are at 
work, putting together the framework of ' flats,' and covering 
the framework itself with canvas. Some are constructing the 
long cylinders, or rollers, used for ' drops.' or ' cloths ;' while 
others, on their knees, are busily following with a hand-saw 
the outline of a rock, or tree, marked in red lead by the scene- 
painter or profile (thin wood) required for a set piece. Mr. 
Tacks is in his glory, with his ' power of nails and screws ' 
around him. He pounces on the official immediately. He 
must have ; more nails,' more ' hands ;' spreading out his own 
emphatically. Give him 'hands!' The stage-manager 
pacifies and promises. Stand by, there, while four brawny 
carpenters rush from another portion of the ' shop ' with the 
1 Pagoda of Arabian Delights,' dimly looming through canvas 
and whitewash ! 

A curious race of men these theatrical carpenters. Some 
of them growl scraps of Italian operas, or melodramatic 
music, as they work. They are full of traditional lore anent 
the • Lane ' and the ' Garden ' in days of yore. Probably their 
fathers and grandfathers were theatrical before them ; for it 
is rare to find a carpenter of ordinary life at stage work, or 
vice versa. Malignant members of the ordinary trade whisper 
even that their work never lasts, and is only fit for the ideal 
carpentry of a theatre. There is a legend, also, that a stage- 
carpenter being employed once to make a coffin, constructed 
it after the Hamlet manner, and ornamented it with scroll- 
work. They preserve admirable discipline, and L obey the 



22 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

master carpenter Implieity ; but, work once over, and out of 
the theatre, he is no more than one of themselves, and takes 
beer with Tom or Bill, and the chair at their committee and 
sick-club reunions, in a perfectly republican and fraternal 
manner. These men labour from six in the morning until 
six in the evening ; and, probably, as Fee-fo-f urn is a ' heavy 
pantomime,' from seven until the close of the performances. 
At night, when the gas battens below the flies are all lighted, 
the heat is somewhat oppressive : and, if you lie on your face 
on the floor, and gaze through the chinks of the planking, you 
will hear the music in the orchestra, and catch an occasional 
glimpse of the performers on the stage beneath, marvellously 
foreshortened, and microscopically diminished. The morning 
we pay our visit, a rehearsal is going on below, and a hoarse 
command is wafted from the stage to ' stop that hammering ' 
while Marc Antony is pronouncing his oration over the dead 
body of Caesar. The stage-manager, of course, is now wanted 
down stairs, and departs, with an oft-iterated injunction to 
' get on. 5 We, too, must ' get on ' without him. 

We enter another carpenters' shop, smaller, but on the 
same level, and occupying a space above the horse-shoe ceil- 
ing of the audience part of the theatre. A sort of martello of 
wood occupies the centre of this apartment, its summit going 
through the roof. This is at once the ventilator, and the 
{ chandelier house ' of the theatre. If we open a small door, 
we can descry, as our eyes become accustomed to the semi- 
darkness, that it is floored with iron, in ornamented scroll- 
work, and opening with a hinged trap. We can also see the 
ropes and pulleys, to which are suspended the great centre 
chandelier, and by which it is hauled up every Monday 
morning to be cleaned. More carpenters are busily at work, 
at bench and trestles, sawing, gluing, hammering. Hark ! 
we hear a noise like an eight- day clock on a gigantic scale 
running down. They are letting down a pair of flats in the 
painting-room. Let us see what they are about in the paint- 
ing-room itself. 

Pushing aside a door, for ever on the swing, we enter an 
apartment, somewhat narrow, its length considered, but very 
lofty. Half the roof, at least, is skylight. A longitudinal 
aperture in the flooring traverses the room*close to the wall. 
This is the ' cut,' or groove, half a foot wide, and seventy feet 
in depth, perhaps, in which hangs a screen of wood-work, 
called a 'frame.' On this frame the scene to be painted is 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 23 

placed : and, by means of a counterweight and a windlass, is 

worked up and down the cut, as the painter may require : 
the sky being thus as convenient to his hand, as the lowest 
stone or bit of foliage in the foreground, When the scene is 
finished, a signal is given to ' stand clear ' below, and a bar in 
the windlass being removed, the frame slides with immense 
celerity down the cut to the level of the stage. Here the 
carpenters remove the flat-, or wings, or whatever else may 
have been painted, and the empty frame is wound up again 
into the painting-room. Sometimes, instead of a cut, a 
1 bridge ' is used. In this case the scene itself remains sta- 
tionary, and the painter stands on a platform, which is wound 
up and down by a windlass as he may require it — a ladder 
being placed against the bridge if he wishes to descend with- 
out shifting the position of his platform. When the scene is 
finished, a trap is opened in the floor, and the scene slung by 
ropes to the bottom. The ; cut : and frame are, it is needless 
to say, most convenient, the artist being always able to con- 
template the full effect of his work, and to provide himself 
with what colours, or sketches, he may need, without the 
trouble of ascending and descending the ladder. 

Mr. Brush, more bespattered than ever, with a * double 
tie ' brush in his hand, is knocking the colour about, bravely. 
Five or six good men and true, his assistants, are also em- 
ployed on the scene he is painting — the fairy palace of 
Fee-fo-fum. perchance. One is seated at a table, with some- 
thing very like the toy theatres of our younger days, on 
which Ave used to enact that wonderful • Miller and his Men, 3 
with the famous characters (always in one fierce attitude of 
triumphant defiance, we remember) of Mr. Park before him. 
It is. in reality, a model of the stage itself: and the little bits 
of pasteboard he is cutting out and pasting together form 
portions of a scene he is modelling ; to scale ' for the future 
guidance of the carpenter. Another is fluting columns with 
a thin brush called a ' quill tool/' and a long ruler, or 
' straight-edge." Different portions of the scene are allotted 
to different artists, according to their competence, from Mr. 
Brush, who finishes and touches up everything, down to the 
fustian-jacketed whitewasher, who is ; priming ? or giving a 
preparatory coat of whiting and size to a pair of wings. 

Are you at all curious to know how the brilliant scenes 
you see at night are painted; you may watch the whole pro- 
cess of a pair of flats growing into a beautiful picture, under 



24 GASLIGHT A2JTD DAYLIGHT. 

Mr. Brush's experienced hands. First, the scene, well primed, 
and looking like a gigantic sheet of coarse cartridge-paper on 
a stretcher, is placed on the frame ; then, with a long pole, 
cleft at the end, and in which is stuck a piece of charcoal, 
Mr. Brush hastily scrawls (as it seems) the outline of the 
scene he is about to paint. Then, he and his assistants ' draw 
in ' a finished outline with a small brush and common ink, 
which, darkening as it dries, allows the outline to shine 
through the first layers of colour. Then, the whitewasher, 
; labourer/ as he is technically called, is summoned to ' lay 
in ' the great masses of colour — sky, wall, foreground, &c, 
which he does with huge brushes. Then, the shadows are 
' picked in ' by assistants, to whom enters speedily Mr. 
Brush, with a sketch in one hand, and brushes in the other, 
and he finishes — finishes, too, with a delicacy of manipulation 
and nicety of touch which will rather surprise you — pre- 
viously impressed as you may have been with an idea that 
scenes are painted with mops, and that scenic artists are a 
superior class of house-painters. Stay, here is the straight 
line of a cornice to be ruled from one part of the scene to the 
other, a space fifty feet wide, perhaps. Two labourers, one 
at either end, hold a string tightly across where the desired 
line is to be. The string has been well rubbed with pow- 
dered charcoal, and, being held up in some part, for a mo- 
ment, between the thumb and finger, and then smartly 
vibrated on to the canvas, again leaves a mark of black char- 
coal along the whole length of the line, which being followed 
by the brush and ink, serves for the guide line of the cornice. 
Again, the wall of that magnificent saloon has to be covered 
with an elaborate scroll-work pattern. Is all this outlined by 
the hand, think you P No ; a sheet of brown paper, per- 
forated with pin-holes with a portion of the desired pattern, 
is laid against the scene ; the whole is then gently beaten with 
a worsted bag full of powdered charcoal, which, penetrating 
through the pin-holes, leaves a dotted outline, capable of 
repetition ad infinitum by shifting the pattern. This is called 
' pouncing.' Then some of the outlines of decoration are 
' stencilled ;' but for foliage and rocks, flowers and water, 
I need not tell you, my artistical friend, that the hand of 
Mr. Brush is the only pouncer and stenciller. For so grand 
a pantomime as ' Fee-fo-fum,' a scene will, probably, after 
artistic completion, be enriched with foil paper and Dutch 
metal. Admire the celerity with which these processes are 



GETTING- UP A PANTOMIME. 25 

effected. First, an assistant cuts the foil in narrow strips 
with a penknife: another catches them up like magic, and 
glues them ; another claps them on the canvas, and the scene 
is foiled. Then Mr. Brush advances with a pot, having a 

lamp beneath, filled with a composition of Burgundy pitch, 
rosin, glue, and Lees-wax. called ' mordant.' T\ ith this and 
a camel-hair brush, he delicately outlines the parts he wishes 
gilt. Half a dozen assistants rush forward with books of 
Dutch metal, and three-fourths of the scene are covered, in 
a trice, with squares of glittering dross. The superfluous 
particles are rubbed off with a dry brush, and, amid a very 
Danaean shower of golden particles, the outlines of mordant, 
to which the metal has adhered, become gradually apparent 
in a glittering net- work. 

Around this chamber of the arts are hung pounces and 
stencils, like the brown-paper patterns in a tailor's shop. 
There is a ledge running along one side of the room, on which 
is placed a long row of pots filled with the colours used, which 
are ground in water, and subsequently tempered with size, a 
huge cauldron of which is now simmering over the roomy 
fire-place. The colour-grinder himself stands before a table, 
supporting an ample stone slab, on which, with a marble 
muller, he is grinding Dutch pink lustily. The painters 
palette is not the oval one used by picture painters, but a 
downright four-legged table, the edges of which are divided 
into compartments, each holding its separate dab of colour. 
while the centre serves as a space whereon to mix and gra- 
duate the tints. The j whitewashed walls are scrawled over 
with rough sketches and memoranda, in charcoal or red lead, 
while a choice engraving, here and there, a box of water- 
colours, some delicate flowers in a glass, some velvet drapery 
pinned against the wail, hint that in this timber-roofed, uii- 
papered, uncarpeted, Bize-and-whitewash-smelling workshop. 
there is Art as vreil as Industry. 

Though it is only of late years, mind you, that scene- 
painters have been recognised as Artists at all. They were 
called 'daubers,' ' white washers,' -paper-hangers.' by that 
class of artists to whom the velvet cap, the turn-down collars. 
and the ormolu frame, were as the air they breathed. These 
last were the gentlemen who thought it beneath the dignity 
of Art to make designs for wood-engravers, to paint porcelain, 
to draw patterns for silk manufacturers. Gradually they 
found out that the scene-painters made better architects, land 



26 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

scape painters, professors of perspective, than they themselves . 
did. Gradually they remembered that in days gone by, such 
men as Salvator Eosa, Inigo Jones, Canaletto,' and Philip de 
Loutherbourg were scene-painters ; and that, in our own 
times, one Stanfield had not disdained size and whitewash, 
nor a certain Eoberts thought it derogatory to wield the 
' double tie ' brush. Scene-painting thenceforward looked up ; 
and even the heavy portals of the Academy moved creakingly 
on their hinges for the admittance of distinguished professors 
of scenic art. 

We have been hindering Mr. Brush quite long enough, I 
think, even though we are invisible ; so let us descend this 
crazy ladder, which leads from the painting-room down 
another flight of stairs. So : keep your hands out before you, 
and tread cautiously, for the management is chary of gas, and 
the place is pitch dark. Now, as I open this door, shade your 
eyes with your hand a moment, lest the sudden glare of light 
dazzle you. 

This is the ' property-room.' In this vast, long, low room, 
are manufactured the ' properties ' — all the stage furniture and 
paraphernalia required during the performance of a play. 
Look around you and wonder. The walls and ceiling are 
hung, the floor and tables cumbered with properties : ■ — ■ 
Shylock's knife and scales, Ophelia's coffin, Paul Pry's um- 
brella, Macbeth/s truncheon, the caldron of the Witches, Har- 
lequin's bat, the sickle of Norma, Mambrino's helmet, swords, 
lanterns, banners, belts, hats, daggers, wooden sirloins of beef, 
Louis Quatorze chairs, papier-mache goblets, pantomime 
masks, stage money, whips, spears, lutes, flasks of ' rich bur- 
gundy,' fruit, rattles, fish, plaster images, drums, cocked hats, 
spurs, and bugle-horns, are strewn about, without the slightest 
attempt at arrangement or classification. Tilted against the 
wall, on one end, is a four-legged banqueting table, very 
grand indeed, — white marble top and golden legs. At this 
table will noble knights and ladies feast richly off wooden 
fowls and brown-paper pies, quaffing, meanwhile, deep pota- 
tions of toast-and- water sherry, or, haply, golden goblets full 
of nothing at all. Some of the goblets, together with elaborate 
flasks of exhilarating emptiness, and dishes of rich fruit, more 
deceptive than Dead Sea apples (for they have not even got 
ashes inside them), are nailed to the festive board itself. On 
very great occasions the bowl is wreathed with cotton wool, 
and the viands smoke with a cloud of powdered lime. Dread- 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 27 

fully deceptive are these stage banquets and stage purses. 
The haughty Hospodar of Hungary drinks confusion to the 
Bold Bandit of Bulgaria in a liquorless cup, vainly thirsting, 
meanwhile, for a pint of mild porter from the adjacent 
hostelry. Deep are his retainers in the enjoyment of Warden 
jDiesand lusty capons, while their too often empty interiors cry 
dolorously for three penn'orth of cold boiled beef. Liberal is 
he also of broad florins, and purses of moidores, accidentally 
drawing, perchance, at the same time, a Lombardian deben- 
ture for his boots from the breast of his doublets. The meat 
is a sham, and the wine a sham, and the money a sham ; but 
are there no other shams, oh, brothers and sisters ! besides 
those of the footlights? Have I not dined with my legs- 
under sham mahogany, illuminated by sham wax-lights ? 
Has not a sham hostess helped me to sham boiled turkey ? 
Has not my sham health been drunk by sham friends ? Do I 
know no haughty Hospodar of Hungary myself ? 

There is one piece, and one piece only, on the stage, in 
which a real banquet — a genuine spread — is provided. That 
piece is ' No Song, Xo Supper.' However small may be the 
theatre — however low the state of the finances — the imme- 
morial tradition is respected, and a real leg of mutton graces the 
board. Once, the chronicle goes, there was a heartless 
monster, in property-man shape, who substituted a dish of 
mutton chops for the historical gigot. Execration, abhorrence, 
expulsion followed his iniquitous fraud, and he was, from that 
day, a property-man accursed. Curiously enough, while the 
leg of mutton in ■ Xo Song, ISo Supper,' is always real, the 
cake, introduced in the same piece, is as invariably a counter- 
feit — the old stock wooden cake of the theatre. "When it shall 
be known why waiters wear white neckcloths, and dustmen 
shorts and ankle jacks, the proximate cause of this discrepancy 
will, perhaps, be pointed out. 

To return to the property-room of the Theatre Royal, 
Hatton Garden. Mr. Gorget, the property ' master,' as he is 
called, is working with almost delirious industry. He has 
an imperial crown on his head (recently gilt — the crown, not 
the head — and placed there to dry), while on the table before 
him lies a mass of modelling clay, on which his nimble fingers 
are shaping out the matrix of a monstrous human face, for a 
pantomimic mask. How quickly, and with what facility he 
moulds the hideous physiognomy into shape — squeezing the 
eyelids, flattening the nose, elongating the mouth, furrowing 



28 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

the cheeks ! When this clay model is finished, it will be well 
oiled, and a cast taken from it in plaster of Paris. Into this 
cast (oiled again) strips of brown paper, well glued and sized, 
will be pasted, till a proper thickness is obtained. When dry, 
the cast is removed, and the hardened paper mask ready for 
colouring. At this latter process, an assistant, whose nose and 
cheeks are plentifully enriched with Dutch metal and splashes 
of glue, is at work. He is very liberal with rose pink to the 
noses, black to the eyebrows, and white r to the eye. Then 
Mrs. Gorget, a mild little woman, who has been assiduously 
spangling a demon's helmet, proceeds to ornament the masks 
with huge masses of oakum and horsehair, red, brown, and 
black, which are destined to serve as their coiffure. Busily 
other assistants are painting tables, gilding goblets, and 
manufacturing the multifarious and bewildering miscellaneous 
articles required in the ' comic business ' of a pantomime ; the 
sausages which the Clown purloins, the bustle he takes from 
the young lady, the fish, eggs, poultry, warming-pans, babies, 
pint pots, butchers' trays, and legs of mutton, incidental to 
his chequered career, 

Others besides adults are useful in the property-room. A 
bright-eyed little girl, Mr. Gorget's youngest, is gravely 
speckling a plum-pudding ; while her brother, a stalwart 
rogue of eleven, sits on a stool with a pot full of yellow ochre 
in one hand, and a brush in the other, with which he is 
giving a plentiful coat of bright yellow colour to a row con- 
taining a dozen pairs of hunting-boots. These articles of 
costume wall gleam to-night on the legs and feet of the hunts- 
men of his highness the Hospodar, with whom you are already 
acquainted. Their wearers will stamp their soles on the merry 
green sward — ha, ha! — weaving above their heads the tin 
porringers, supposed to contain Khine wine or Baerische beer. 

Mr. Gorget will have no easy task for the next three weeks. 
He will have to be up early and late until ' Fee-fo-fum ' is 
produced. The nightly performances have, meanwhile, to be 
attended to, and any new properties wanted must be made, 
and any old ones spoilt must be replaced, in addition to what 
is required for the pantomime. And something more than 
common abilities must have abiding place in a property-man, 
although he does not receive uncommonly liberal remunera- 
tion. He must be a decent upholsterer, a carpenter, a wag- 
maker, a painter, a decorator, accurate as regards historical 
property, a skilful modeller, a facile carver, a tasteful em- 



GETTING UP A PANTOMIME. 29 

broiderer, a general handy man and jack-of-all-trades. He 
must know something of pyrotechnics, a good deal of carving 
and gilding, and a little of mechanics. By the exercise of all 
these arts he earns, perhaps, fifty shillings a week. 

Come away from the property-room, just a glance into that 
grim, cavernous, coal-holey place on the left, where all the 
broken-up, used-out, properties are thrown, and is a sort of 
limbo of departed pantomimes ; and peeping curiously also 
into the room, where, on racks and on hooks, are arranged the 
cuirasses, muskets, swords, spears, and defunct yeomanry 
helmets, of the pattern worn when George the Third was king, 
which form the armoury of the theatre. Time presses, and 
we must have a look at the proceedings in the wardrobe. 

Mr. Baster is busily stitching, with many other stitchers 
(females), sedent, and not squatting Jagod-like, all of a row. 
His place of work is anything but large, and movement is 
rendered somewhat inconvenient, moreover, by a number of 
heavy presses, crammed to repletion with the costumes of the 
establishment. Mr. Baster has been overhauling his stock, to 
see what he can conveniently use again, and what must indis- 
pensably be new. He has passed in review the crimson 
velvet nobleman, the green-serge retainers, the spangled 
courtiers, the glazed-calico slaves, the ' shirts,' * shapes,' 
' Eomaldis,' and ' strips ' of other days. He has held up to 
the light last year's Clown's dress, and shakes his head 
ruefully, when he contemplates the rents and livings, the 
rags and tatters, to which that once brilliant costume is 
reduced. Clown must, evidently, be new all over. Mr. 
Baster's forewoman is busy spangling Harlequin's patch-work 
dress ; while, in the hands of his assistants, sprites and genii, 
slaves and evil spirits, are in various stages of completion. 
So, in the ladies' wardrobe, where Miss de Loggie and her 
assistants are stitching for dear life, at Sea-nymphs', and 
Sirens', and Elfins' costume ; and where Miss Mezzanine, who 
is to play Columbine, is agonizingly inquisitive as to the fit of 
her skirt and spangles. 

Work, work, work, everywhere ; — in the dull bleak morn- 
ing, when play-goers of the previous night have scarcely 
finished their first sleep ; at night, to the music of the 
orchestra below, and amid, the hot glare of the gas. Mr. 
Tacks carries screws in his waistcoat pockets, and screws in 
his mouth. Mr. Gorget grows absolutely rigid with glue, 
while his assistants' heads and hands are unpleasantly en- 



SO GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

riched with Dutch metal and foil-paper ; and the main stair- 
case of the theatre is blocked up with frantic waiters from 
adjoining hostelries laden with chops and stout for Mr. Brush 
and his assistants. The Management smiles approvingly, 
Tout winces uneasily, occasionally, as Boxing-day draws 
near ; the stage-director is unceasing in his ' get ons.' All 
day long the private door of the Management is assailed by 
emissaries from Mr. Tacks for more nails, from Mr. Brush for 
more Venetian red and burnt sienna, from Mr. Baster for 
more velvet, from Mr. Gorget for more glue. The Manage- 
ment moves uneasily in its chair. ' Great expense,' it says. 
< If it should fail ?' ' Give us more nails, " hands," Venetian 
red, velvet, and glue, and we'll not fail,' chorus the ants 
behind the baize. 

Nor must you suppose that the pantomimists — Clown, 
Harlequin, Pantaloon, and Columbine — nor the actors playing 
In the opening, nor the fairies who fly, nor the demons who 
howl, nor the sprites who tumble, are idle. Every day the 
opening and comic scenes are rehearsed. Every day a melan- 
choly man, called the repe'titeur, takes his station on the stage, 
which is illumined by one solitary gas jet ; and, to the dolour- 
music he conjures from his fiddle, the pantomimists, in over- 
suits of coarse linen, tumble, dance, jump, and perform other 
gymnastic exercises in the gloom, until their bones ache, and 
the perspiration streams from their limbs. 

"Work, work, work, and Christmas-eve is here. Nails, 
hammers, paint-brushes, needles, muscles and limbs going in 
every direction. Mr. Brush has not had his boots cleaned for 
a week, and might have forgotten what sheets and counter- 
panes mean. Mr. Brush's lady in Camden Villa is, of course, 
pleased at the artistic fame her lord will gain in the columns 
of the newspapers, the day after the production of the panto- 
mimes, but she can't help thinking sometimes that Brush is 
4 working himself to death.' No man works himself to death, 
my dear Mrs. B. 'Tis among the idlers, the turners of the 
heavy head, and the folders of the hands to rest, that death 
reaps his richest harvest. No snap-dragon for Mr. Tacks, no 
hunt-the-slipper for Mr. Gorget. Pleasant Christmas greet- 
ings and good wishes, though, and general surmises that the 
pantomime will be a ' stunning ' one. Christmas-day, and, 
alas and alack ! no Christmas beef and pudding, save that 
from the cook-shop, and perchance the spare repast in the 
covered basin which little Polly Bruggs brings stalwart Bill 



GETTIXG UP A PANTOMIME. 31 

Bruggs, the carpenter, who is popularly supposed to be able 
to carry a pair of wings beneath each arm. Incessant fiddling 
from the repetiteur. ' Trip,' ' rally/ and ' jump,' for the pan- 
tomimists. Work on the stage, which is covered with canvas, 
and stooping painters, working with brushes stuck in bamboo 
walking-sticks. Work in the flies, and work underneath the 
stage, on the umbrageous mezzonine floor, where the cellar- 
men are busily slinging ' sinks ' and ' rises/ and greasing 
traps. An overflow of properties deluges the green-room; 
huge masks leer at you in narrow passages ; pantomimic 
wheelbarrows and barrel-organs beset you at every step. So 
all Christmas-night. 

Hurrah for Boxing-clay ! The ' compliments of the season,' 
and the ' original dustman.' Tommy and Billy (suffering 
slightly from indigestion) stand with their noses glued against 
the window-panes at home, watching anxiously the rain in 
the puddles, or the accumulating snow on the house-tops. 
Little Mary's mind is filled with radiant visions of the re- 
splendent sashes she is to wear, and the gorgeous fairies she 
is to see. John, the footman, is to escort the housemaid into 
the pit ; even Joe Barrikin, of the New Cut, who sells us our 
cauliflowers, will treat his t missus ' to a seat in the gallery . 
for the first performance of Harlequin Fee-fo-fum. 

There — the last clink of the hammer is heard, the last- 
stroke of the brush, and the last stitch of the needle. The 
Management glances with anxious approval at the elaborately 
funny bill — prepared with the assistance of almost every adult 
employed in the establishment, who is supposed to have a 
' funny ' notion about him, subject, of course, to the editorial 
supervision of the author, if he be in town, and the Manage- 
ment can catch him or he catch the Management — of the even- 
ing's entertainment. It is six o'clock in the evening. The 
Clown (Signor Brownarini, of the Theatres Eoyal) has a jug 
of barley-water made, his only beverage during his tumbling, 
and anxiously assures himself that there is a red-hot poker 
introduced into the comic business ; ' else/ says he, ' the pan- 
tomime is sure to fail.' Strange, the close connection between 
the success of a pantomime and that red-hot poker. A pan- 
tomime was produced at a London Theatre — the old Adelphi, 
I think — without (perhaps through inadvertence) a red-hot 
poker. The pantomime failed lamentably the first night. 
Seven o'clock, and one last frantic push to get everything 
ready. Tommy, Billy, Mary, Papa and Mamma, arrive in 



32 • GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

flies, broughams, or cabs. The footman and housemaid are 
smiling in the pit ; and Joe Barrikin is amazingly jolly and 
thirsty, with his ' missus ' in the gallery. Now then, ' Music I* 
' Play up !' ' Order, order !' and, ' Throw him over !" c George 
Barnwell,' or 'Jane Shore/ inaudible of course, and then 'Har- 
lequin Fee-fo-fum, or the Enchanted Fairy of the Island of 
Abracadabra.' Fun, frolic, and gaiety ; splendour, beauty, 
and blue-fire ; hey for fun ! ' How are you to-morrow ?' and I 
hope success and crowded houses till the middle of February, 
both for the sake of the author, the Management, and the 
Theatre Eoyal, Hatton Garden, generally. 

The ants behind the baize have worked well, but they have 
their reward in the ' glorious success ' of the pantomime they 
have laboured so hard at. They may wash their faces, and 
have their boots cleaned now ; and who shall say that they 
do not deserve their beer to-night, and their poor salaries next 
Saturday ? 

Eeader, as Christmas time comes on, pause a little ere you 
utterly condemn these poor phry-acting people as utter profli- 
gates, as irreclaimable rogues and vagabonds. Consider how 
hard they work, how precarious is their employment, how 
honestly they endeavour to earn their living, and to do their 
duty in the state of life to which it has pleased Heaven to call 
them. Admit that there is some skill, some industry, some 
perseverance, in all this, not misdirected if promoting harm- 
less fancy and innocent mirth. 



III. 

DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY. 



It is natural that a metropolis so gigantic as the Empress-city 
of Britain should set the fashion to its provincial kinsfolk. 
It is, I believe, a fact not very much controverted, that 
London habits, London manners and modes, London notions 
and London names are extensively copied, followed, and 
emulated in the provinces. There is scarcely a village, not 
to say a town in Great Britain where some worthy tradesman 
has not baptized his place of business London House, or the 
London Eepository, where he pretends to sell London porter, 
London hosiery, or London cutlery. There are few towns 
that do not number among their streets several whose appella- 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL. FAR AWAY. 33 

tions are drawn from the street-lists of the London Post-Office 
Directory. Eegent Streets. Bond Streets. St. James's Streets, 
Pall Mails, Drory Lanes. Strands, Fleet Streets, Ludgate 
Hills, Covent Gardens, Cheapsides, and Waterloo Places 

abound in great profusion throughout the whole of the United 
Kingdom. There is sometimes a ludicrous incongruity 
between the appearance, class, and species of street familiar in 
London, and the synonymous street presented in a country 
town. A man. for instance, is apt to be puzzled when he 
finds a little greasy cube of ill-favoured houses, resembling a 
bar of soap just marked for cutting into squares figured down 
as Belgrave Place or Wilton Crescent. He will not be 
quite prepared to recognise Cheapside in a series of basket- 
makers' cottages with small kitchen-gardens ; nor will a 
dirty thoroughfare, principally occupied by old clothes- 
vendors and marine-store-dealers, quite come up to his ideas 
of Bond Street or Eegent Street. Islington — composed of a 
long avenue of merchants' warehouses, each rejoicing in a 
plurality of stories, with gaping doors where there should be 
windows, and huge cranes from which perpetually balance 
sacks of meal or hogsheads of sugar after the manner of 
Mahomet's coffin — creates in the mind of the London-bred 
Islingtonian a curious dissociation of ideas. And when he 
comes upon a Grosvenor Street, in the guise of a blind alley, 
or upon a Holborn fringed with pretty suburban villas, or a 
Piccadilly next to a range of pigsties, or a Fleet Street 
planted with flowering shrubs, he cannot fail to doubt 
whether a street is still a street ' for a' that.' 

These topographical incongruities have lately been brought 
under my notice in the great commercial port of Liverpool. 
In Liverpool, which can show — its suburbs and dependencies 
included — a population not much under four hundred thou- 
sand souls, I found Pall Malls, Fleet Streets. Covent Gardens, 
Drury Lanes, Houndsditches. Islingtons. and other places, all 
with London names, and all with a most opinionated want of 
resemblance to their London sponsors. Islington I found to 
be not a district, but a single street, the site of several public- 
houses, one or two pawnbrokers', and numerous chandlers' 
shops. Fleet Street is without bustle, Drury Lane without 
dirt, and Covent Garden without an apple or an orange. 
Park Lane — the very sound of which is suggestive of curly- 
wigged coachmen, high-stepping carriage-horses fjobbed 
mostly; but such is life), silver-studded harness, luxurious 

D 



34: GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

carriages liung on feathery springs, ostrich feathers, diamonds, 
Danish dogs, blue ribbons, the ladies' mile, the Grenadier 
Guards, and the Duke of Somerset's coronet-tipped gas-lamps, 
the whole pomp, pride, and circumstance of our glorious 
aristocracy — Park Lane I found to be filled with shops, pave- 
ment, and population ; and devoted to the vending of marine- 
stores, the purveying of fiery gin, the receipt of miscellaneous 
•articles in pledge, and the boarding, lodging, and fleecing — 
with a little hocussing, crimping, and kidnapping included — 
of those who go down to the sea in ships : in short, a West 
Coast Wapping. 

There is, however, no rule without an exception ; and I 
came ultimately upon a street, which, albeit possessing certain 
originalities of aspect and existence not to be found else- 
where, did nevertheless offer in its general character some- 
thing approaching a resemblance to the London highway from 
which it has drawn its name. Whoever built this street was 
evidently a man impressed with a sufficient idea of the 
general fitness of things. He must have been a travelled, or, 
at least, a well-read man ; and he evidently had a keen 
remembrance of that great London artery which stretches 
from Aldgate Pump to Mile End Gate, London, when he 
called that Liverpool street, Whitechapel. 

I am thankful to him for having done so; for had the 
Liverpool Whitechapel not resembled in some measure the 
London Whitechapel, and thereby become exceptional, I 
should — having walked Down Whitechapel Way, in London, 
one Saturday night in eighteen hundred and fifty-one — not 
have walked down this Whitechapel Way (two hundred and 
twenty miles away) one Saturday night in eighteen hundred 
and fifty -three. 

Whitechapel in Lancashire is so far like Whitechapel in 
Middlesex, that it is passably dirty, moderately thronged by 
day, and inconveniently crowded by night ; is resorted to by 
a variety of persons of a suspicious nature, and by a consider- 
able number about whom there can be no suspicion at all : 
that, moreover, it has a kerb-stone market for the negotiation 
of fruit and small ware : that it is scoured by flying 
tribes of Bedouins, in the guise of peripatetic street vendors : 
that it is sprinkled with cheap tailoring establishments, cheap 
eating and coffee-houses, cheap places of public amusement, 
and finally, that it is glutted with gin-palaces, whisky-shops, 
taverns, and public-houses of every description. 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY. 35 

Thus far the two streets rim in concert, but they soon 
diverge. The Liverpool Whitechapel is intensely maritime 
(or what I may call ' Dockish'), intensely Hibernian — in its 
offshoots or side-streets almost wholly so — intensely com- 
mercial, and during the daytime, not wholly unaristocratic ; 
for it is intersected in one part by Church Street, the Eden of 
the haberdashers' shops and the pet promenade of the beauty 
and fashion of the City of the Liver. Lord Street the proud 
branches off from it, full of grand shops, and the pavement of 
which is daily trodden by those interesting specimens of 
liumanity, s hundred thousand pound men :' — humble-minded 
millionnaires who disdain carriages in business hours, and in 
the humility of their wealth, condescend to pop at stray times 
into quaint little taverns, where they joke with the landlady, 
and ask for the ' Mail ' or the ' Mercury ' after you have done 
with it, as though they were nothing more than wharfingers 
•or entering clerks. Nor are these all the high connections 
Whitechapel in Liverpool can claim. At the upper end 
branches off a short thoroughfare, leading into Dale Street, 
likewise patronised by the magnates of Liverpool. At its 
extreme end, again, is the confluence of streets abutting on 
the stately London and North- Western Terminus in Lime 
Street, and on the great ojDen space, where stands that really 
magnificent building, St. George's Hall. The consequence of 
all this is that there is a constant cross-stream of fashionables 
mingling with the rushing river of the prof a nam valgus. 

It is half-past ten o'clock ; for the early-closing system — 
on Saturdays, at least — is not prevalent in Liverpool ; and 
thousands have yet their purchases to make on Sunday morn- 
ing. Before we enter Whitechapel, glowing with gas flowing 
from enormous jets, we are attracted by an extra blaze of 
light, by a concourse of people, and by a confusion of tongues, 
over which one strident and resonant voice dominates ; all 
being gathered round the booth of Messrs. Misture and Fitt, 
to which booth we must turn aside for a moment. 

In the left hand centre of a piece of waste land, these gentle- 
men have boldly pitched — among the potsherds, the dead cats, 
and broken bottles— a monster marquee, gaily decorated with 
pink and white stripes and variegated flags. Here Messrs. 
Misture and Fitt have gone into the quack line of business, in 
a Bohemian or travelling manner. They are herb doctors, 
chiropodists, universal medicine vendors, veterinary prescri- 

d 2 



36 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

bers, and much more besides. A mob of men, women, and 
children are talking, screaming, laughing, and jesting around 
the temporary laboratory of these medical sages', before a long 
counter which creaks beneath a bountiful spread of nasty- 
looking preparations, pills, pots of ointment, bottles of sarsa- 
parilla, cases of herbs, blisters, plaisters, and boluses. The 
whole affair has the appearance of the stock in trade of half a 
dozen unsuccessful chemists and druggists, who had been 
burnt out or emigrated to the backwoods, or set up business 
in Canvas Town, and here clubbed the remainder of their 
goods as a last effort to sell off under prime cost. There are 
several gaily-decorated placards eulogistic of Misture's Epi- 
leptic Pills, and Fitt's Concentrated Essence of Peppermint. 
Fitt is haranguing his select auditory as we draw near. 
His style of eloquence is something beyond the old hocus- 
pocus diatribes of the old medical mountebanks. He is not 
so broad as Cheap Jack, not so lofty as Dulcamara, not so 
scientifically unintelligible as the quacks you see in the 
Champs Elysees or the Boulevard du Temple, in Paris. But 
he is astonishingly rapid ; and mingles with a little bit of 
sporting a snack of slang, and a few genteel anecdotes of the 
nobility and gentry. He has so fluent a delivery, such tick- 
ling jokes for the men and such sly leers for the ladies, that 
the former slap their legs and break forth into enthusiastic 
encomiums in the dialect of Tim Bobbin. The latter simper 
and blush delightfully. Some of his jokes apply forcibly to 
the personal appearance of a select few of his auditory, and 
provoke roars of laughter. A happy allusion to the neigh- 
bouring church-yard, being close to a doctor's shop, tells 
immensely. At the upper end of the drug-heaped counter 
the other partner, Misture — hard-featured with a fox's face ; 
one of those men who will wear black clothes and white 
neckcloths, and who never can look respectable in them — is 
silently but busily engaged in handing over divers packets of 
the medicines his partner has been praising to eager and nu- 
merous purchasers. I see through Misture and Fitt in a 
moment. Fitt is the volatile partner, the fine arts professor. 
Misture is the sound practical man of business. Misture is 
the careful builder, who lays the foundation and gets up the 
scaffolding : Fitt does the ornamental work and puts on the 
fancy touches. Do you not remember when Geoffrey Crayon 
and Buckthorne went to the bookseller's dinner, that the 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY. 37 

latter pointed out the partner who attended to the carving, 
and the partner who attended to the jokes ? They are proto- 
types of Misture and Fitt. 

The busy throng tends TVhitechapel way, and down White- 
chapel we must go. So great is the number of orange-sellers 
and oranges in Whitechapel, that it would seem as if the 
whole of one year's produce of St. Michael's and the Azores 
had been disgorged into the narrow street this Saturday night. 
The poor creatures who sell this fruit — desperately ragged 
and destitute — were formerly much harried and beset by the 
police, who in their over-zeal made descents and razzias upon 
them, put them to horrid rout and confusion, and made so 
many of them captives to their bows and spears (or batons), 
that the miserable creatures scarcely dared to venture into the 
light for grievous fear and trembling. They offered oranges 
in bye-places and secret corners, as if they had been smuggled 
merchandise, prohibited under annihilating penalties. Lat- 
terly, however, some benevolent persons took their case in 
hand ; and, demonstrating to the authorities that to obstruct a 
thoroughfare was not quite high treason, nor to offer an orange 
for sale was not quite sufficient to warrant a human creature 
being hunted like a wild beast, the dread taboo was taken off, 
and some small immunities were conceded to the army of 
orange-vendors. 

My Uncle's counting-houses, which abound here in White- 
chapel, are all thronged to-night. As per flourishing gold 
letters on his door-jamb, he proposes to lend money on plate, 
jewellery, and valuables ; but he is not much troubled with 
plate, jewellery, or valuables on a Saturday night. If you 
enter one of these pawnshops — they are called so plainly, 
without reticence or diffidence, hereabout — and elbow your 
way through Yallambrosian thickets of wearing apparel and 
miscellaneous articles, you will observe these peculiarities in 
the internal economy of the avuncular life, at variance with 
London practice ; that the duplicates are not of card-board, 
but of paper having an appearance something between Dock- 
warrants and Twelfth-cake lottery-tickets, and that the front 
of each compartment of the counter is crossed by a stout 
wooden barrier ; whether for the convenience of the pledger 
to rest his elbows on while transacting business, or to restrain 
the said pledger from violently wresting from My Uncle's 
hands any article before he has legally redeemed it, I am un- 
able to sav. Furthermore, it will be not without emotion that 



38 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

you will become sensible that in very many of the pawnbrok- 
ing warehouses my Uncle is for the nonce transformed into 
my Aunt — not simply figuratively, in the French sense — but 
substantially. The person who unties your package, names 
the extent of the investment therein by way of loan, fills up 
the duplicate and hands you the cash is a Young Lady ; 
sharp-eyed, quick-witted, and not to be done by any means. 

I have said that my Uncle is troubled with, few articles of 
any considerable value on Saturday nights. This is ordinarily 
the case ; but not unfrequently a young lady of an inflamed, 
complexion bears down on my Uncle, laden with the spoils 
of some galleon from the Spanish Main; the watch, chain, 
trinkets, and clothes of some unfortunate sailor fresh from 
abroad, whom she has plundered. Sometimes this tight craft 
disposes successfully of her booty, and sheers off with all her 
prize-money, and with flying colours; but occasionally, sus- 
picions being awakened and signals made to the Preventive, 
she is compelled to heave-to, and to tack, and to change her 
course, and even to proceed under convoy to a roadstead known 
as Bridewell ; the harbour-dues of which are so considerable, 
that an overhauling before a stipendiary magistrate, and 
a lengthened sojourn in a graving dock near Kirkdale gaol 
are absolutely necessary before she can get to sea again. 
Sometimes, again, a drunken sailor (they are every whit as 
apt to rob themselves as to be robbed) will drop in with a 
watch, or a gold thumb ring, or even the entire suit of clothes 
off his back to pawn. One offered a five-pound note in pledge 
on a Saturday night ; upon which my Uncle considerately lent 
him (he was very far gone) five shillings — taking care to 
ascertain to what ship he belonged — and the next morning, 
to Jack's great joy and astonishment, returned him four pounds 
fifteen shillings. 

Here is a ' vault :' it has nothing to do with pallid death. 
It is, indeed, a chosen rendezvous for ' life,' in Whitechapel — 
such life as is comprised in spirituous jollity, and the convi- 
viality that is so nearly allied to delirium tremens. The vault 
is large enough to be the presence-chamber of a London gin- 
palace ; but lacks the gilding, plate-glass, and French polish, 
which are so handsomely thrown in with a London penny- 
worth of gin. The walls are soberly coloured ; the only mural 
decorations being certain and sundry oleaginous frescoes, due, 
perhaps, to the elbows and heads of customers reclining there- 
against. The bar-counter is very high, and there are no 



DOWX WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY. 39 

enclosed bars or snuggeries ; but there is one unbroken line 
of shop-board. The vault is very full to-night. A party of 
American sailors in red flannel shirts, and bushy whiskers, 
and ear- rings, are liberally treating a select party of ladies 
and gentlemen ; hosts and guests being already much the 
worse for liquor. One mariner, to my personal knowledge, 
had been regaling for the last ten minutes on a series of 
1 glasses to follow,' of almost every exciseable fluid, taken 
without any relation to their chemical affinities or proper 
order of succession. He is now reduced to that happy frame 
of mind, common, I am told, in some stages of Bacchic emotion, 
which leads him to believe, and to state (indistinctly), that 
though he has spent his last sixpence, it is ' awright ; and 
that things generally must come round and be as satisfactory 
(in a rectified point of view) as a trivet. Xext to the sailors 
and their guests are a knot of Irish labourers, gesticulating, 
quarrelling, and all but fighting, in their native manner, and 
according to the custom of their country. Xext are ragged 
women, and mechanics, who have already spent, prospec- 
tively, up to the Friday of the next week's earnings. Xext, 
and next, and next, are sailors, and Irish, and women, and 
mechanics, over and over again. 

We are arrested at the door by an episode of a domestic 
nature, which merits tarrying an instant to witness. A very 
broad Lancastrian chandler's-shop-keeper, speaking broad 
Lancashire, and of mature years, has been drinking in an ad- 
joining apartment with a Sergeant and a couple of recruits 
of one of Her Majesty's regiments of militia. Arrived at that 
happy state in which the celebrated Willie may reasonably be 
supposed to have been when he had finished brewing the peck 
of malt, it has occurred to this eccentric tradesman to slip on 
one of the recruit's scarlet jackets, and to represent to the 
partner of his joys (who, according to the Hymeneal Statute 
in that case made and provided, has ' fetched ' him) that he 
has ' listed ;' at which she sheds abundant floods of tears, and 
beseeches him to ' cast t' red rag off and coom awa.' c Coom 
awa, Eobert, coom awa,' she passionately says, ' vans nowt 
but jack-shappers (hangmen), vans nowt but " shejDstering 
rads " (whatever can they be ?) coom awa ! The'll crop ? te pow, 
lad. They'll mak thee shouther arms, lad. Dunnago wi' 'em, 
Eobert.' But her adjurations are vain. Her husband — who, 
however far gone he may be in liquor, is a long way too far 
Xorth to 'list in reality — maintains the impossibility of vio- 



40 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lating the engagement he has recently entered into with Her 
Majesty the Queen. ' I'se geatten byounty, lass,' he repre- 
sents, 'an I mun go wi Seargent !' At length, deeming 
further expostulation useless, she abandons the cause ; ' Go 
thy ways, thou fool,' she exclaims ; ' Go thy ways and be 
hanged, thou Plump Muck f with which last transcendant 
figure of rhetoric she sweeps into the street. Whether the 
appellation of ' Plump-Muck ' (pronounced ' ploomp-mook ') 
has touched some hidden chord in her husband's bosom, or 
whether the bent of his inebriety takes suddenly another di- 
rection, I could not discover, but he presently falls into a fit 
of grievous weeping, and to use his own words. ' whips off 
t' skycarlet rag ' and follows his spouse into Whitechapel, into 
which we emerge likewise. 

More gas, more music, and more crowds. Wax- work shows 
where Monsieur Kossuth, Queen Elizabeth, and Gleeson 
Wilson the murderer, may be seen for the small charge of one 
penny. Baffles for fancy articles on the Sea-side bazaar plan, 
with results nearly as profitable. Panoramas of Versailles, 
the Himalaya Mountains, and the City of Canton. Shooting 
Galleries (down cellar-steps), Dissolving Views, Dancing and 
Singing Saloons. These, with shops for the sale of chandlery, 
slop-clothing, hosiery, grocery, seamen's bedding, ships' 
stores, and cheap literature (among which, I grieve to say it, 
the blood-and-thunder school preponderates), makeup the rest 
of Whitechapel. It is the same in the continuation thereof : 
Paradise Street, which, however, boasts in addition a gigantic 
building known as the Colosseum : once used as a chapel, and 
with much of its original ecclesiastical appearance remaining ; 
but now a Singing Saloon, or a Tavern Concert, crowded to 
the ceiling. 

As we wander up and down the crowded, steaming thorough- 
fare, we catch strange glimpses occasionally of narrow streets. 
Some occupied by lofty frowning warehouses ; others tenanted 
by whole colonies of Irish ; ragged, barefooted, destitute ; 
who lurk in garrets and swelter in back rooms, and crouch in 
those hideous, crowded, filthy, underground cellars, which are 
the marvel and the shame of Liverpool — warehouses and 
cellars, cellars and warehouses without end — wealth, the 
result of great commercial intelligence, rising up proudly 
amidst misery, hunger, and soul-killing ignorance. 

If I may be allowed to make a parting remark concerning the 
Lancashire W'hitechapel, it is with reference to its elasticity. 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 41 

All the rags and wretchedness, all the huckstering merchan- 
dise, seem to possess a facility for expanding into gigantic com- 
merce and boundless wealth. Not a cobbler's stall, a petty 
chandler's shop, but seems ready to undertake anything in the 
wholesale way at a moment's notice, and to contract for the 
supply of the Militia with boots and shoes, or the British navy 
with salt beef and tobacco immediately. Hucksters change 
with wonderful rapidity into provision dealers, brokers into 
salesmen, small shopkeepers into proprietors of monster em- 
poriums. The very destitute Irish in this city of all cities of 
commerce, (the Great Liverpool runs even London hard in 
matter of fast trading !) after a preliminary apprenticeship to 
the begging and hawking business, become speculators and 
contractors on a surprising scale. 

So may Whitechapel flourish all the year round, I say : may 
its dirt, when I next see it, be changed to gold, and its rags 
to fine linen, and its adjoining cellars to palaces. Although, 
to be sure, the one disastrous thing likely is, that, when the 
work of transmutation is completed, other rags, and cellars, 
and dirt, will take the place of what has been changed to fine 
linen, palaces, and gold. The ball must roll, and something 
must be undermost. 



IV. 

JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 



Coming from Greenwich or Blackwall, radiant with 'Bad- 
minton,' or ' Cider cup ;' or, perchance, coming home very 
satiated and sea-sick from foreign parts, tired, jaded, used-up, 
as a man is apt to be under such circumstances, the Pool 
always pleases, enlivens, interests me. I pull out the trumpet- 
stop of my organ of veneration ; my form dilates with the tall 
spars around me ; I lose all count of the wonders of the lands 
I have seen, of the coming cares and troubles — the worrying 
and bickering — awaiting me, perhaps, in that remorseless, 
inevitable London yonder. I forget them all in the Pool. If 
I have a foreigner with me, so much the better. ' Not in 
crimson- trousered soldiery,' I cry, i oh ! Louis or Alphonse 
— not in the constant shouldering of arms, and the drumming 
that never ceases, — not in orders of the day, or vexatious pass- 
ports, are the glories of Britain inscribed. See them in that 



42 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

interminable forest of masts, the red sun lighting rip the cupolas 
of Greenwich, the tarry hulls, the patched sails, the laden 
hay-boats, the trim wherries, the inky waters of the Pool. 
Eead them in the cobweb rigging ; watch them curling from 
the short pipes of red-capped mariners lounging on the bul- 
warks of timber ships ! Ships upon ships, masts everywhere ? 
even in the far-off country, among trees and churches ; the 
commerce of the world jammed up between these cumbered 
wharves, and overflowing into these narrow creeks !' 

I propose to treat, as shortly as I can consistently with ac- 
curacy, of maritime London, and of ' Jack ' (alluding, under 
that cognomen, to the general ' seafaring ' class) alive in 
London. 

6 Jack ' is c alive,' to my knowledge and experience, in East 
Smithneld, and in and about all the Docks ; in Poplar, Lime- 
house, Eotherhithe, Shad well, Wapping, Bermondsey, and the 
Island of Dogs. He is feebly alive in Fenchurch Street and 
the Minories ; but he shows special and vigorous symptoms of 
vitality in Eatcliffe Highway. If it interest you at all to see 
him alive, and to see how he lives, we will explore, for some 
half-hour or so, this very muddy, tarry, salt-water-smelling 
portion of the metropolis. 

You can get to Eatcliffe Highway through the Minories : you 
may attain it by a devious route through VVhitechapel and Mile 
End New Town ; but the way / go, is from London Bridge, 
down Thames Street, and through the Tower, in order to come 
gradually upon Jack alive, and to pick up specimens of his 
saline existence bit by bit. 

London Bridge is densely crowded, as it has been, is, and 
always will be, I suppose. The wheels of the heavy waggons, 
laden with bales and barrels, creak and moan piteously ; while 
the passengers, who are always certain of being too late (and 
never are) for a train on the South-Eastern Eailwaj 7 , goad cab- 
men into performing frantic pas de deux with their bewildered 
horses. The sportive bullocks, too, the gigs, ku ackers' carts, 
sheep, pigs, Barclay's drays, and cohorts of foot-passengers, 
enliven the crowded scene. 

Comfortably corn-crusbed, jostled, and dust-blinded, I 
descend the night of stairs on the right of the King William 
Street side of the bridge. I have but to follow my nose along 
Thames Street to Eatcliffe ; and I follow it. I elbow my way 
through a compact mass of labourers, porters, sailors, fish- 
women, and spruce clerks, with their bill books secured by a 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 43 

' leather-covered chain round their waists. Eoom there, for a 
hot sugar-broker tearing by, towards the Exchange, bursting 
with a recent bargain ! Eoom for a spruce captain (he had 
his boots cleaned by one of the ' brigade ' opposite Billingsgate 

I Market) in an irreproachable state of clean-shirtedness, navy- 
blue-broadciothedness and chimney-pot-hattedness ! He sets 
his big silver watch at every church, and dusts his boots with 

| an undoubted bandanna. He has an appointment, doubtless, 
at Garraway's or the Jerusalem Coffee House, with his owner 
or broker. 

A gush of fish, stale and fresh, stretches across Thames 
Street, as I near Billingsgate Market. I turn aside for a 
moment, and enter the market. Business is over ; and the 
male and female purveyors of the treasures of the deep solace 
themselves with pipes and jovial converse. 

Jack is getting more lively all through Thames Street and 
Tower Street, and is alarmingly vital when I emerge on Tower 
HilL A row of foreign mariners pass me, seven abreast: 
swarthy, ear-ringed, black-bearded varlets in red shirts, light- 
blue trousers, and with sashes round their waists. Part of the 
crew of a Sardinian brig, probably. They have all their arms 
round each other's necks ; yet I cannot help thinking that 
they look somewhat ' knifey,' ' stilettoey.' I hope I may be 
mistaken, but I am afraid that it would be odds were you to 
put an indefinite quantity of rum into them, they would put a 
few inches of steel into you. 

But I enter the Tower postern, and am in another London 
— the military metropolis — at once. Very curious and 
wonderful are these old gray towers, these crumbling walls, 
these rotting portcullises, so close to the business-like brick- 
and-mortar of St. Katherine's Dock House hard by. What 
has the ' Devilin Tower,' the ' Scavenger's Daughter,' the 
' Stone Kitchen,' to do with wholesale grocers, ship-chandlers, 
and outfitting warehouses ? Is there not something jarring, 
discordant, in that grim, four-turreted old fortalice, frowning 
on the quiet corn and coal- carrying vessels in the pool ? What 
do the ' thousand years of war ' so close to the ' thousand years 
of peace ?' Is not the whole sombre, lowering old pile, a huge 
anachronism? Julius Caesar, William the Third, and the 
Docks ! Wharves covered with tubs of peaceful palm-oil, 
and dusky soldiers sauntering on narrow platforms, from 
whence the black mouths of honeycombed old guns grin 
(toothless, haply) into peaceful dwelling-houses. The dried- 



44 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

up moat, the 'old rooms, wall-inscribed with the overflowings 
of weary hearts; the weazen-faced old warders, with their 
strange, gone-by costume ; the dinted armour, and rusted 
headman's axe ; all tell — with the vacant space on the Green, 
where the four posts of the scaffold stood, and the shabby 
little church, where lie Derwentwater and Lovat, Anne Boleyn 
and Northumberland, the innocent and the guilty, the dupers 
and the duped — of things that have been, thank God ! 

I pass a lane where the soldiers live (why should their 
wives necessarily be slatterns, their children dirty, and they 
themselves alternately in a state of shirt-sleeves, beer and 
tobacco, or one of pipe-clay, red blanketing, and mechanical 
stolidity, I wonder ?) and ask an artilleryman on guard where 
a door of egress is to be found. He ' dwoan't know :' of 
course not. Soldiers never do know. It isn't in the articles 
of war, or the Queen's regulations. Still, I think my friend 
in the blue coat, and with the shaving-brush stuck at the top 
of his shako, would be rather more useful in guarding a 
fortress, if he knew the way into and the way out of it. 

Patience, ' trying back,' and the expenditure of five minutes, 
at last bring me out by another postern, leading on to Tower 
Hill the less, East Smithfield, St. Katherine's Docks, and the 
Mint ; very nearly opposite is a narrow street, where a four- 
oared cutter, in the middle of the pavement, in progress of 
receiving an outer coat of tar and an inner one of green paint, 
suggests to me that Jack is decidedly alive in this vicinity ; 
while, closely adjacent, a monster - union jack,' sloping from 
the first-floor window of an unpretending little house, 
announces the whereabouts of the 4 Eoyal Naval Eendezvous.' 
You have perhaps heard of it more frequently as the house of 
reception for the • Tower Tender.' The Eendezvous, and the 
Tender too, had a jovial season of it in the war-time, when the 
press was hot, and civilians were converted into ' volunteers ' 
for the naval service, by rough compulsion. The neighbour- 
hood swarmed with little ' publics,' embellished with cartoons 
of the beatified state of Jack, when alive in the navy. Jack 
was continually drinking grog with the port-admiral, or 
executing hornpipes with the first-lieutenant. The only 
labour imposed on him (pictorially) was the slaying half a 
dozen Frenchmen occasionally before breakfast ; for which a 
grateful country rewarded him with hecatombs of dollars. At 
home, he was represented frying gold watches, and lighting 
pipes with five pound notes. Love, liquor, and glory ! King 



JACK ALIYE IN LONDON. 45 

and country! Magnificent bounty, &c, &c, &c. But the 
picture has two sides ; for Jack hung back sometimes, prefer- 
ring to fry watches in the merchant service. A grateful country 
pressed him. He ran away from captivity ; a grateful country 
flogged him. He mutinied ; a grateful country hanged him. 
Whether it was the flogging, or the hanging, or the scurvy, or 
the French bullets, or the prisons at Verdun and Brest, I 
won't be certain; but Jack became at last quite a scarce 
article. So the Eoyal Naval Eendezvous, and the Tower 
Tender were obliged to content themselves with the sweepings 
of the prisons — thieves, forgers, murderers, and the like. 
These even grew r scarce ; and a grateful country pressed every- 
body she could lay her hands on. ' Food for powder ' was 
wanted — ' mortal men ' good enough to ' fill a pit,' must be 
had. Quiet citizens, cripples, old men were pressed. Appren- 
tices showed their indentures, citizens their freedom, in vain. 
Britannia must have men. People would come home from 
China or Honolulu, and fall into the clutches of the press- 
gang five minutes after they had set foot on land. Bags of 
money would be found on posts on Tower Hill, left there by 
persons who had been pressed unawares. People would leave 
public-house parlours to see what sort of a night it was, and 
never be seen or heard of again. I remember, even, hearing 
from my nurse, during childhood, a ghostly legend of how the 
Lord Chancellor, going over Tower Hill one night with the 
great seal in a carpet-bag, and < disguised in liquor ' after a 
dinner at Guildhall, was kidnapped by a press-gang, sent on 
board the Tower Tender, and not released until three months 
afterwards, when he was discovered on board the ' Catspaw ' 
frigate, in the Toulon fleet, scraping the mizen-mast, under 
the cat of a boatswain's mate. Of course I won't be answer- 
able for the veracity of the story ; but we scarcely need its 
confirmation to find plenty of reasons to bless those glorious 
good old times when George the Third was king. 

Times are changed with the Eendezvous now. Sailors it 
still craves ; but good ones — A. B.'s ; not raffish gaol-birds 
and useless landsmen. The A. B.'s are not so plentiful, 
though the times are so peaceful. The A. B/s have heard of 
the ' cat ;' and they know what ' holystoning ' and ' black- 
listing' means. There is a stalwart A. B., I watch, reading 
a placard in the window of the Eendezvous, stating that the 
' Burster,' one hundred and twenty guns, fitting at Plymouth, 
wants some able-bodied seamen. 'Catch a weasel asleep,' 



46 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

says the A. B., walking on. He belongs to the ' Chutnagore,' 
A 1, under engagement to sail for Madras, and would rather 
not have anything to do with the ' Burster/ 

A weather-beaten old quarter-master stands on the steps of 
the Eendezvous, and eyes the A. B. wistfully. The A. B. is 
the sort of man Britannia wants just now. So are those 
three black-whiskered fellows, swaggering along with ^a 
Yankee skipper, with whom they have just signed articles 
for a voyage to Boston, in the ' Peleg Whittle ;' Coon, master. 
Poor old quarter-master ! give him but his ' four-and-twenty 
stout young fellows,' his beloved press-gang ; and the ' Chut- 
nagore ' would go one A. B. short to sea ; while Captain 
Coon would vainly lament the loss of three of the crew of the 
* Peleg Whittle.' The ' Burster' is very short of hands ; but 
he has bagged very few A. B.'s yet. See, a recruit offers ; a 
lanky lad in a torn jacket, with an air of something like 
ragged respectability about him ! He wants to ' go to sea.' 
The quarter-master laughs at him — repulses him. The boy 
has, ten to one, run away from school or from home, with 
that vague indefinite idea of ' going to sea ' in his mind. To 
sea, indeed ! He has prowled about the docks, vainly impor- 
tuned captains, owners, seamen, anybody, with his request. 
Nobody will have anything to do with him. The greatest 
luck in store for him would be the offer of a cabin-boy's 
berth on board a collier, where the captain would regale him 
with the convivial crowbar and the festive ropes-end, when- 
ever the caprice seized him. Going to sea ! Ah, my young 
friend ! trudge home to Dr. Broomback's seminary — never 
mind the thrashing— explain to your young friends, impressed 
as you have been with a mania for ' runriing away and going 
to sea,' that it is one thing to talk about doing a thing, and 
another to do it ; that a ragged little landsman is worse than 
useless aboard ship ; and that there are ten chances to one 
even against his ever being allowed to put his foot on ship- 
board. 

I leave the Eoyal Naval Eendezvous just as a dissolute 
Norwegian stops to read the ' Burster ' placard. Now, I turn 
past the Mint, and past the soldiers on guard there, and 
pursue the course of a narrow little street leading towards 
the Docks. 

Here, Jack leaps into great life. Ship-chandlers, ship- 
grocers, biscuit-bakers, sail-makers, outfitting warehouses, 
occupy the shops on either side. Up a little court is a nau- 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 47 

jiical day-school for teaching navigation. There is a book- 
stall, on which lie the ' Seaman's Manual,' the ; Shipmaster's 
Assistant/ and Hamilton Moore's ' Navigation.' There is a 
j nautical instrument maker's, where chronometers, quadrants,, 
and sextants are kept, and blank log-books are sold. The 
stationers display forms for manifests, bills of lading, and 
charter-parties. Every article vended has some connection 
with those who go down to the sea in ships. 

When we enter St. George's Street, where there are shops 
on one side of the way, and St. Katherine's Dock warehouses 
on the other, Jack becomes tremendously alive on the pave- 
ment. Jack from India and China, very sunburnt, and 
smoking Trichinopoly cheroots — thin cigars with a reed 
passed through them, and nearly a foot long. American 
Jack, in a red worsted shirt, and chewing indefatigably. 
Swedish Jack, smelling of tallow and turpentine, but 
amazingly good-natured, and unaffectedly polite. Italian 
Jack, shivering. German Jack, with a light-blue jacket and 
yellow trousers, stolid and smoky ; Greek Jack, voluble in 
petticoats, and long boots. Grimy seamen from colliers ; 
smart, taut men, from Green's or Wigram's splendid East 
India ships ; mates in spruce jackets, and gold-laced caps, 
puffing prime Havannahs. Lastly, the real unadulterated 
English Jack, with the inimitable roll, the unapproachable 
hitch, the unsurpassable flowers of language. The pancake 
hat stuck at the back of the head, the neckerchief passed 
through a wedding-ring, the flaring yellow silk handkerchief; 
the whole unmistakeable costume and demeanour — so unlike 
the stage sailor, so unlike the pictorial sailor — so like only 
what it really is. 

This is the busiest portion of the day, and the Highway is 
crowded. Enthusiasts would perhaps be disappointed at the 
woful lack of nautical vernacular prevalent with Jack. He 
is not continually shivering his timbers ; neither is he always 

I requesting you to stand by and belay; to dowse the lee- 
scuppers, or to splice the main-brace. 

The doors of the public-houses disgorge great crowds of 
mariners ; nor are there wanting taverns and eating-houses, 

i where the sailors of different nations may be accommodated. 

I Here is a ' Deutsches Gasthaus, 9 a Prussian ' BierhalleJ a real 
' Norwegian House/ Stay! Here we are at the Central 
Bock gates, and, among a crowd of sailors, hurrying in and 
out, swarm forth hordes of Dock labourers to their dinner. 



48 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

A very queer company, indeed ; — ' navvies,' seafaring men, 
and individuals of equivocal dress and looks, who have 
probably taken to the ' two shillings ' or half-crown a day 
awarded for Dock toil, as a last refuge from inevitable starva- 
tion. Discharged policemen, ruined medical students, clerks 
who have lost their characters, Polish and German refugees, 
might be found, I opine, in those squalid ranks. It is all 
equality now, however. The college-bred youth, the educated 
man, must toil in common with the navvy and the tramp. 
They seem contented enough, eating their poor meals, and 
puffing at the never-failing pipe with great gusto. Poor and 
almost destitute as these men are, they can yet obtain a species 
of delusive credit — a credit by which they are ultimately 
defrauded. Crafty victuallers will advance them beer and 
food on the security of their daily wage, which they them- 
selves secure from the foremen. They exact, of course, an 
enormous interest. It is, after all, the old abuse, the old 
Tommy-shop nuisance — the 'infamous truck system' — the 
iniquitous custom of paying the labourers at the public- 
house, and the mechanic late on the Saturday night. 

I have not time to enter the Docks just now ; and plunge 
further into the Babel of Eatcliffe Highway. Jack is alive 
everywhere by this time. A class of persons remarkably 
lively in connection with him, are the Jews. For Jack are 
these grand Jewish outfitting warehouses alone intended. 
For his sole use and benefit are the swinging lamps, the 
hammocks and bedding, the code of signal pocket-hand- 
kerchiefs, the dreadnought coats, sou-wester hats, telescopes, 
checked shirts, pilot jackets, case bottles, and multifarious 
odds and ends required by the mariner. For Jack does 
Meshech manufacture the delusive jewellery ; while Shadrach 
vaunts the watch that has no works ; and Abednego con- 
fidentially proposes advances of cash on wages-notes. Jewry- 
is alive, as well as Jack, in Eatcliffe Highway. You may 
call that dingy little cabin of a shop, small ; but, bless you ! 
they would fit out a seventy-four in ten minutes, with every- 
thing wanted, from a spanker boom to a bottle of Harvey's 
Sauce. For purposes marine, they sell everything; — biscuits 
by sacksfull, bales of dreadnoughts, miles of rope, infinities 
of fishing-tackle, shaving-tackle, running-tackle, spars, sex- 
tants, sea-chests, and hundreds of other articles. Jewry will 
even supply you with sailors ; will man vessels for you, from 
a cock-boat to an Indiaman. Jewry has a capital black cook 



JACK ALIYE IN LONDON. 49 

inside. A third mate at two minutes' notice. A steward in 
the twinkling of a handspike. Topmast men in any quantity, 
and at immediate call. 

A strange sound — half human, half ornithological — breaks 
on the ear above the turmoil of the crowded street. I follow 
a swarthy mariner, who holds a cage, muffled in a hand- 
kerchief in his hand, a few yards, until he enters a large and 
handsome shop, kept also by a child of Israel, and which 
literally swarms with parrots, cockatoos, and macaws. Here 
they are, in every variety of gorgeous plumage and curvature 
of beak : w^ith their wicked-looking, bead-like eyes and crested 
heads ; screaming, croaking, yelling, swearing, laughing, sing- 
ing, drawing corks, and winding up clocks, with frantic 
energy ! Most of these birds come from South America and 
the coast of Africa. Jack generally brings home one or two 
as his own private venture, selling it in London for a sum 
varying from thirty to forty shillings. I am sorry to have to 
record that a parrot which can swear well, is more remunera- 
tive to Jack than a non-juring bird. A parrot w 7 hich is 
accomplished enough to rap out half a dozen round oaths in a 
breath, will fetch you fifty shillings, perhaps. In this shop, 
also, are stuffed humming-birds, ivory chessmen, strange 
shells, and a miscellaneous collection of those foreign odds 
and ends, called ' curiosities. 5 Jack is very lively here with 
the rabbinical ornithologist. He has just come from the 
Gold Coast in a man-of-war, the captain of which, in con- 
sideration of the good conduct of the crew while on the 
station, had permitted each man before the mast to bring as 
many parrots home with him as he liked. And they did 
bring a great many, Jack says — so many, that the vessel be- 
came at last like a ship full of women ; the birds creating 
such an astonishing variety of discordant noises, that the men 
were, in self defence, obliged to let some two or three hundred 
of them (they didn't keep count of fifty or so) loose. Hundreds, 
however, came safe home ; and Jack has two or three to dis- 
pose of. They whistle hornpipes beautifully. I leave him 
still haggling with the ornithologist, and triumphantly elicit- 
ing a miniature ' Joe Bee's Vocabulary of Slang ' from the 
largest of his birds. 

You are not to suppose, gentle reader, that the population 
of KatclifFe is destitute of an admixture of the fairer portion 
of the creation. Jack has his Jill in St. George's Street, 
Cable Street, Back Lane, and the Commercial Eoad. Jill is 

E 



50 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

inclined to corpulence ; if it were not libellous, I could hint a 
suspicion that Jill is not unaddicted to the use of spirituous 
liquors. Jill wears a silk handkerchief round her neck, as 
Jack does ; like him, too, she rolls, occasionally ; I believe, 
smokes, frequently ; I am afraid, swears, occasionally. Jack 
is a cosmopolite — here to-day, gone to-morrow; but Jill is 
peculiar to maritime London. She nails her colours to the 
mast of Eatcliffe. Jill has her good points, though she does 
scold a little, and fight a little, and drink a little. She is just 
what Mr. Thomas Dibdin has depicted her, and nothing more 
or less. She takes care of Jack's tobacco-box ; his trousers 
she washes, and his grog, too, she makes ; and if he enacts 
occasionally the part of a maritime Giovanni, promising to 
walk in the Mall with Susan of Deptford, and likewise with 
Sal, she only upbraids him with a tear. I wish the words of 
all songs had as much sense and as much truth in them as 
Mr. Dibdin's have. 

A hackney-coach (the very last hackney-coach, I verily 
believe, in London, and the one, moreover, which my Irish 
maid-of-all-work always manages to fetch me when I send 
her for a cab) — a hackney-coach, I say, jolts by, filled inside 
and out ! Jack is going to be married. I don't think I am 
mis-stating or exaggerating the case, when I say that the 
whole party — bride, bridegroom, bridesmaids, bridesmen, 
coachman and all — are considerably the worse for liquor. Is 
this as it should be ? Ah, poor Jack ! 

And I have occasion to say "Poor Jack!' a good many 
times in the course of my perambulations. It is my personal 
opinion that Jack is robbed — that he is seduced into extra- 
vagance, hoodwinked into spendthrift and dissolute habits. 
There is no earthly reason why Jack should not save money 
out of his wages ; why he should never have a watch without 
frying it, nor a five-pound note without lighting his pipe 
with it. It cannot be indispensable that he should be con- 
tinually kept ' alive ' with gin ; that he should have no com- 
panions save profligate women, no amusements save low 
dancing-saloons and roaring taverns. The sailor has a strong 
religious and moral bias. He scorns and loathes deceit, 
dishonesty, and injustice, innately. He is often a profligate, 
and a drunkard, and a swearer (I will not say blasphemer), 
because abominable and vicious customs make him so ; 
because, ill-cared for on board ship, he no sooner lands than 
he becomes the prey of the infamous harpies who infest 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 51 

maritime London. He is robbed by outfitters (I particularise 
neither Jew nor Gentile, for there are six of one and half a 
dozen of the other) ; he is robbed by the tavern-keepers, the 
crimps, and the boarding-masters. He is robbed by his 
associates, robbed in business, robbed in amusement. ' Jack ' 
is fair game to everybody. 

The conductors of that admirable institution, the Sailors' 
Home, I understand, are doing their best to alleviate the 
evils I have lightly, but very lightly, touched upon. Jack 
is alive, but not with an unwholesome galvanic vitality, in 
the Home. He is well fed, well treated, and well cared- 
for, generally ; moreover, he is not wronged. The tailor 
who makes his clothes, and the landlord who sells him his 
beer, and the association that board him, do not con- 
spire to rob him. The only shoal the managers of the 
Sailors' Home have to steer clear of, is the danger of in- 
culcating the idea among sailors, that the institution has 
anything of a gratuitous or eleemosynary element in its 
construction. Sailors are high-spirited and eminently inde- 
pendent in feeling. 

I have come by this time to the end of the straggling series 
of broad and narrow thoroughfares, which, under the names 
of East Smithfield, St. George's Street, Upper Shadwell Street, 
and Cock Hill, all form part, in the aggregate, of Batcliffe 
Highway. I stand on the threshold of the mysterious region 
comprising, in its limits, Shadwell, Poplar, and Limehouse. 
To my left, some two miles distant, is Stepney, to which 
parish all children born at sea are, traditionally, said to be 
chargeable. No longer are there continued streets — ' blocks,' 
as the Americans call them — of houses. There are swampy 
fields and quaggy lanes, and queer little public-houses like 
ship-cuddies, transplanted bodily from East Indiamen, and 
which have taken root here. The c Cat and Fiddle ' is a 
waterman's house — 'jolly young watermen,' I am afraid, no 
more. At the ' Bear and Harp ' — so the placard informs me — 
is held the ' Master Mariners' Club.' Shipbuilders' yards 
start suddenly upon me — ships in full sail bear down on me 
through quiet lanes ; lofty masts loom spectrally among the 
quiet graves in the churchyard. In the church yonder, where 
the union-jack flies at the steeple, there are slabs com- 
memorating the bequests of charitable master- mariners, dead 
years ago ; of an admiral's widow, who built an organ ; of the 
six poor women, who are to be yearly relieved as a thank- 

e 2 



52 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

offering for the release of some dead and gone Levant trader 
' from captyvitie among the Turkes in Algeeres.' In the grave- 
yards, scores of bygone sea-captains, their wives, and children, 
shipwrights, ropemakers, of the olden time, dead pursers, 
and ship-chandlers, sleep quietly. They have compasses and 
sextants, and ships in full sail, sculptured on their moss- 
grown tombs. The wind howls no more, nor the waves roar 
now for them. Gone aloft, I hope, most of them ! — though 
Seth Slipcheese, the great ship-contractor, who sold terribly 
weevilly biscuit, and salted horse for beef, sleeps under that 
^substantial brick tomb yonder : while beneath the square 
stone slab with the sculptured skull and hour-glass, old 
Martin Flibuster may have his resting-place. He was called 
'captain,' nobody knew why; he swore terribly; he had 
strange foreign trinkets and gold doubloons hanging to his 
watch-chain, and told wild stories of parboiled Indians, and 
Spanish Dons, with their ears and noses slit. What matters 
it now if he did sail with Captain Kidd, and scuttle the ' Ellen 
and Mary/ with all hands aboard? He died in his bed, and 
who shall say, impenitent ? 

The old sea-captains and traders connected with the j sea 
have still their abiding places in quiet, cosy little cottages 
about here, mostly tenements, with green doors and bow- 
windows, and with a summer-house perched a-top, where 
they can twist a flag on festive occasions, and enjoy their 
grog and tobacco on quiet summer evenings. The wild 
mania for building — the lath-and-plaster, stucco-palace, Cock- 
ney-Corinthian frenzy, has not yet extended to Limehouse, 
and the old ' salts ' have elbow-room. 

I must turn back here, however ; for it is nearly four 
o'clock, and I shall be too late else for a peep into the Docks. 
The Docks ! What a flood of recollections bursts through 
the sluice-gates of my mind, as I gaze on the huge range of 
warehouses, the swarms of labourers, the crowd of ships ! 
Little as many of us know of maritime London, and of the 
habits of Jack alive, we have all been to the Docks, once in 
our lives at least. Was it to see that wonderful seafaring 
relation of ours who was always going out to the Cape with a 
magnificent outfit, and who always returned, Vanderdecken- 
like, without having doubled it — being also minus shoes and 
stockings, and bringing home, as a species of atonement- 
offering, the backbone of a shark ? Was it to dine on board 
the ' Abercrombie, Jenkinson, 5 of I don't know how many 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 53 

hundred tons burden, which went out to Sydney with emi- 
grants, and foundered in Algoa Bay? Was it with that 
never-to-be-forgotten tasting- order for twelve pipes, sixteen 
hogsheads, twelve barrels, of rare ports and sherries, when 
coopers rushed about with candles in cleft sticks, running 
gimlets into casks, and pouring out rich wines into sawdust 
like water ? When we ate biscuits, and rinsed our mouths 
scientifically, and reproached our companions with being up- 
roarious ; but coming out (perfectly sober, of course), could 
not be prevented from addressing the populace on general 
subjects, and repeatedly volunteering the declaration (with 
our hat on the back of our head and the tie of our cravat like 
a bag -wig) that we were ■ All Eight !' 

I remember, as a child, always asking myself how the ships 
got into dock ; a question rapidly followed by alarming incerti- 
tude as to how they got out. I don't think I know much more 
about the matter now, though I listen attentively to a pilot- 
coat and scarred face, who tells me all about it. Pilot-coat 
points to the warehouses, dilates on the enormous wells those 
gigantic brick- work shells contain ; shows me sugar-bags, 
coffee-bags, tea-chests, rice-bags, tubs of tallow, casks of palm- 
oil. Pilot-coat has been everywhere, and every voyage has 
added a fresh scar to his face. He has been to sea since he 
was no higher than ' that ' — pointing to a stump. Went out 
in a convict-ship ; wrecked off St. Helena. Went out to Val- 
paraiso ; had a fever. Went out to Alexandria ; had the 
plague. Went out to Mobile ; wrecked. Went out to Ja- 
maica; fell down the hatchway, and broke his collar-bone. 
Deserted into an American liner; thence into an Australian 
emigrant ship ; ran away at Sydney ; drove bullocks in the 
bush ; entered for Bombay ; entered the Indian navy ; was 
wrecked off the coast of Coromandel ; was nearly killed with 
a Malay creese. Been in a South-sea whaler, a Greenland 
whaler, a South Shields collier, and a Shoreham mackerel 
boat. Who could refuse the ' drop of summut ' to an ancient 
mariner, who has such a tale to tell, were it only to curtail 
the exuberance of his narration ? And it is, and always has 
been, my private opinion, that if the ' wedding guest ' had 
given the real ' ancient mariner ' sixpence for a ' drop of 
summut,' he would have had the pith of his story out of him 
in no time, whereby, though we should have lost an exqui- 
site poem, the ' wedding guest ' would not have been so 
unsufferably bored as he undoubtedly was, and some of 



51 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

us would have known better, perhaps, what the story was 
about. 

You have your choice of Docks in this wonderful maritime 
London. The St. Katherine's Docks, the London, the West 
India Docks lie close together ; while, if you follow the Com- 
mercial Eoad, the East India Docks lie close before you, as 
the Commercial Docks do after going through the Thames 
Tunnel. There are numerous inlets, moreover, and basins, 
and dry docks : go where you will, the view begins or ends 
with the inevitable ships. 

Tarry with me for a moment in the Isle of Dogs, and step 
on board this huge East Indiaman. She is as big as a man- 
of-war, and as clean as a Dutch door-step. Such a bustle as 
is going on inside, and about her, nevertheless ! She is 
under engagement to the ' Honourable Company ' to sail in 
three days' time ; and her crew will have a tidy three days' 
work. There are horses, pigs, bullocks, being hoisted on 
board ; there are sheep in the launch, and ducks and geese in 
the long-boats. French rolls- can be baked on board, and a 
perfect kitchen-garden maintained foreward. Legions of 
stores are being taken on board. Mrs. Colonel Chutney's 
grand piano ; old Mr. Mango's (of the civil service) hookahs 
and black servants ; harness, saddlery, and sporting tackle for 
Lieutenant Griffin of the Bombay cavalry. And there are 
spruce young cadets whose means do not permit them to go 
by the overland route, and steady-going civil and military 
servants of the Company, going out after furlough, and who 
do not object to a four months' sea- voyage. And there are 
black Ayahs, and Hookabadars, and Lascars, poor, bewildered, 
shivering, brown-faced Orientals, staring at everything around 
them, as if they had not quite got over their astonishment 
yet at the rnarvels of Frangistan. I wonder whether the 
comparison is unfavourable to us in their Brahminical minds, 
between the cold black swampy Isle of Dogs, the inky water, 
the slimy hulls, the squalid labourers, the rain and sleet ; 
and the hot sun and yellow sands of Calcutta ; the blue water, 
and dark maiden, with her water-pitcher on her head ; — the 
sacred Ganges, the rich dresses, stately elephants, half-naked 
Sircars of Hindostan ; — the rice and arrack, the paddy-fields 
and bungalows, the punk at o, palankeen, and yellow streak of 
caste of Bengal the beloved ! Perhaps. 

Passengers are coming aboard the Indiaman, old stagers 
wrangling as to the security of their standing bed-places, 



JACK ALIVE IN LONDON. 55 

and young ladies consigned to the Indian matrimonial market, 
delightfully surprised and confused at everything. The 
potent captain of the ship is at the Jerusalem Coffee-house, 
or busy with his brokers ; but the mates are hard at work, 
bawling, commanding, and counter-commanding. Jack is 
alive, above, below, aloft, and in the hold, as usual, shoul- 
dering casks as though they were pint pots, and hoisting 
horses about manfully. 

Shall we leave the Isle of Dogs, and glance at the West 
India Docks for a moment ? Plenty to see here at all events. 
Eice, sugar, pepper, tobacco ; desks saturated quite brown 
with syrup and molasses, just as the planks of a whaling ship 
are slippery. Jack, in a saccharine state, strongly perfumed 
with coffee-berries. Black Jack, very woolly-headed, and 
ivory- grindered, cooking, fiddling, and singing, as it seems 
the nature of Black Jack to cook, fiddle, and sing. Where 
the union-jack flies, digger Jack is well treated. English 
sailors do not disdain to drink with him, work with him, and 
sing with him. Take a wherry, however, to that American 
clipper, with the tall masts, and the fall man for skipper, and 
you will hear a different tale. Beneath the star-spangled ban- 
ner, the allowance of halfpence for Xigger Jacks decreases wo- 
fully, while that of kicks increases in an alarming proportion. 
I would rather not be a black man on board an American ship. 

In the London Docks we have a wonderful mixture of the 
ships of all nations ; while on a Sunday the masts are dressed 
out with a very kaleidoscope of variegated ensigns. Over 
the ship's side lounge stunted Swedes and Danes, and ole- 
aginous Eussians ; while in another, the nimble Gaul, faithful 
to the traditions of his cuisine, is busy scraping carrots for a 
pot aufeu. 

ISot in one visit — not in two — could you, reader! pene- 
trate into a tithe of the mysteries of maritime London ; not in 
half a dozen papers could I give you a complete description 
of Jack alive in London. We might wander through the 
dirty mazes of Wapping, glancing at the queer, disused old 
stairs, and admiring the admirable mixture of rotting boats, 
tarry cable, shell-fish, mud, and bad characters, which is there 
conglomerated. We could study Jack alive in the hostelries, 
where, by night, in rooms the walls of which are decorated 
with verdant landscapes, he dances to the notes of the enli- 
vening fiddle ; we might follow him in his uneven wanderings, 
sympathise with him when he has lost his register ticket, 



56 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

denounce the Jews and crimps who rob him. Let us hope 
that Jack's life will be amended with the times in which we 
are* fortunate enough to live ; and that those who have the 
power and the means, may not long want the inclination to 
stretch forth a helping hand to him. Eatcliffe and Shad well , 
Cable Street and Back Lane, may be very curious in their 
internal economy, and very picturesque in their dirt; but it 
cannot be a matter of necessity that those who toil so hard ? 
and contribute in so great a degree to our grandeur and pros- 
perity, should be so unprotected and so little cared for. 



V. 

THINGS DEPARTED. 



I use the parlour, I am not ashamed to say it, of the ' Blue 
Pigeon.' There was an attempt, some months since, headed^ 
I believe, by that self-educated young jackanapes, Squrrel, to 
prevail on the landlord to change the appellation of ' parlour ' 
into ' coffee-room ;' to substitute horsehair-covered benches 
for the Windsor chairs ; to take the sand off the floor, and the 
tobacco-stoppers off the table. / opposed it. Another per- 
son had the impudence to propose the introduction of a 
horribly seditious publication, which he called a liberal news- 
paper. I opposed it. So I did the anarchical proposition 
to rescind our standing order, that any gentleman smoking 
a cigar instead of a pipe, on club nights, should be fined a 
crown bowl of punch. From this you will, perhaps, Sir, 
infer that I am a Conservative. Perhaps I am. I have my 
own opinions about Catholic Emancipation, Parliamentary 
Eeform, and the Corn Laws. 

I have nothing to do with politics, nor politics with me y 
just now ; but I will tell you what object I have in address- 
ing you. I can't help thinking, coming home from the club 7 
how curiously we adapt ourselves to the changes that are 
daily taking place around us ; how, one b}^ one, old habits 
and old customs die away, and we go about our business, 
as unconcernedly as though they never had been. Almost 
the youngest of us — if he choose to observe, and can re- 
member what he observes — must have a catalogue of ' things 
departed;' of customs, ceremonies, institutions, to which. 



THINGS DEPABTED, 57 

people were used, and which fell gradually into disuse : 
which seemed, while they existed, to be almost necessaries 

of life, and for which now they don't care the value of a 
Spanish bond. There was a friend of mine, a man of genius, 

whose only fault was his continuous drunkenness, who used 
to say that the pith of the whole matter lay in the ' doctrine 
of averages.' I was never a dab at science and that sort of 
thing : but I suppose he meant that there was an average 
in the number of his tumblers of brandy and water, in the 
comings up of new fashions, and in the goings down of old 
ones ; then of the old ones coming up again, and so vice versa, 
till I begin to get muddled (morally muddled, of course), and 
give up the doctrine of averages in despair. 

I have a copious collection in my memory of things de- 
parted. I am no chicken (though not the gray-headed old 
fogy that insulting Squrrel presumes to call me) ; but if I 
were to tell you a tithe of what I can remember in the way of 
departed fashions, manners, and customs, the very margins of 
this paper would be flooded with type. Let me endeavour 
to recall a few — a very few only — of what I call things de- 
parted. 

Hackney-coaches, for instance. Why, a boy of twelve 
years of age can remember them: and yet. where are they 
now? Who thinks of them F Grand, imposing, musty- 
smelling, unclean old institutions they were. Elaborate 
heraldic devices covered their panels ; dim legends used to be 
current amongst us children, that they had all been noble- 
men's carriages once upon a time, but falling — with the 
princely houses they appertained to — into decay, had so come 
to grief and hackney-coachhood. They had wonderful coach- 
men, too — imposing individuals, in coats with capes infinite 
in number. How they drove ! How they cheated ! How 
they swore ! The keenest of your railway cabbies, the most- 
extortionate of your crack Hansoms, would have paled before 
the unequalled Billingsgate of those old-world men, at the 
comprehensive manner in which you, your person, costume, 
morals, family, and connections, were cursed. As all boat- 
men at Portsmouth have (or say they have) been Nelson's cox- 
swain, so used I to believe every hackney-coachman I saw to 
be the identical Jarvey who had been put inside his own 
vehicle by the Prince of Wales, and driven about the metro- 
polis by that frolicsome and royal personage, in company 
with Beau Brummel, Colonel Hanger, and Philippe Egalite. 



58 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

But the hackney-coach is now one of the things departed. 
There is one — one still, I believe — stationed in the environs 
of North Audley Street, Oxford Street. I have seen it — a 
ghostly, "unsubstantial pageant — flit before rne, among cabs 
and omnibuses, like a vehicular phantom ship. The coach- 
man is not the rubicund, many-caped Jehu of yore. He is 
a thin, weazened old man in a jacket (hear it!) and Welling- 
ton boots. The armorial bearings on the coach-panels are 
defaced ; the springs creak ; the wheels stumble as they roll. 
I should like to know the man who has the courage to call 
that hackney-coach off the stand, and to ride in it. He must 
be a Conservative. 

What have they done with the old hackney-coaches ? Have 
they sent them to Paris as raw materials for barricades ? Are 
their, bodies yet mouldering, as in a vale of dry bones, in 
some Long Acre coach-builder's back shop ? and some day, 
mounted on fresh springs, fresh painted and fresh glazed, 
newly emblazoned with heraldic lies, with flaunting hammer- 
cloths and luxurious squabs, are they to roll once more to 
courtly levee, or civic feast, to stop the way at ball or opera, 
to rattle nobility to the portal of St. George's, Hanover 
Square, to be married, or follow it, creeping, and with win- 
dows up, to be buried ? 

What have they done with the old cabriolets, too — the 
bouncing, rattling, garishly-painted cabs, with a hood over 
the passenger, and a little perch on one side for the driver ? 
They upset apple-stalls often — their fares, too, frequently. 
Their drivers were good whips, and their horses skittish. 
Where are they now? Do they ply in the streets of Sydney 
or San Francisco, or have their bodies been cut up, years 
ago, for firewood and lucifer-matches ? 

Intimately connected, in association and in appearance, 
with the Jarveys, were the Charleys, or watchmen. They 
went out with oil-lamps, the Duke of Wellington's ministry, 
and the Bourbon family. Like the coachmen, they wore 
many-caped coats ; like them, they wore low-crowned hats, 
and were rubicund in the countenance ; like them, they were 
abusive. In the days of our youth we used to beat these 
Charleys, to appropriate their rattles, to suspend them in mid 
air, like Mahomet's coffin, in their watch-boxes. Now-a-days, 
there be stern men, Policemen, in oilskin hats, with terrible 
truncheons, and who ' stand no nonsense ;' they do all the 
beating themselves, and lock us up when we would strive to 



THINGS DEPARTED. 59 

knock them down. There is yet. to this day, a watch-box — 
a real monumental watch-box standing, a relic of days gone 
by — somewhere near Orchard Street, Portman Square. It 
has been locked up for years ; and great-coated policemen 
pass it nightly, on their beat, and cast an anxious glance 
towards it, lest night -prowlers should be concealed behind its 
worm-eaten walls. 

And, touching great-coats, are not great-coats themselves 
among the things departed ? We have Paletots (the name 
of which many have assumed), Ponchos, Burnouses, Syl- 
phides, Zephyr wrappers. Chesterfields, Llamas, Pilot wrap- 
pers, Wrap-rascals, Bisuniques, and a host of other garments, 
more or less answering the purpose of an over-coat. But 
where is the great-coat — the long, voluminous, wide-skirted 
garment of brown or drab broadcloth, reaching to the ankle, 
possessing unnumbered pockets ; pockets for bottles, pockets 
for sandwiches, secret pouches for cash, and side-pockets for 
bank-notes ? This venerable garment had a cape, which, 
in wet or snowy weather, when travelling outside the ' High- 
flyer ' coach, you turned over your head. Your father wore 
it before you, and you hoped to leave it to your eldest son. 
Solemn repairs — careful renovation of buttons and braiding 
were done to it, from time to time. A new great-coat was an 
event — a thing to be remembered as happening once or so in a 
lifetime. 

There are more coaches and coats that are things departed, 
besides hackney-coachmen and long great-coats. AY here are 
the short stages ? Where are the days when we went gipsy- 
ing, in real stage-coaches, from the * Flower-Pot,' in Bishops- 
gate Street, to Hipping Forest, or to Kensington, or to the 
inaccesoible Hampstead ? The time occupied in those me- 
morable journeys now suffices for our transportation to 
Brighton — fifty-two good English miles. Y\ here is the 
Brighton coach itself r its four blood-horses; the real live 
baronet, who coached it for a livelihood: and, for all the 
' bloody hand ' in his scutcheon, sent round his servant to 
collect the gratuitous half-crowns from the passengers. 

Things departed are the pleasant view of London from 
Shooter's Hill, the houses on the river, and, over all. the 
great dome of St. Paul's looming through the smoke. What 
is the great North Eoad now ? one of the Queen's highways, 
and nothing more : but, in those days, it was the great coach- 
ing thoroughfare of the kingdom. Highgate flourished ; but, 



60 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

where is Highgate now ? I was there the other day. The 
horses were gone, and the horse-troughs, and the horse- 
keepers. Yet, from the window of the Gate-house I could 
descry in one coup oVceil, looking northwards, thirteen public- 
houses. The street itself was deserted, save by a ragged 
child, struggling with a pig for the battered remnant of a 
kettle. I wondered who supported those public-houses now ; 
whether the taps were rusty, and the pots dull ; or whether, 
in sheer desperation at the paucity of custom, the publicans 
had their beer from one another's houses, and, at night, 
smoked their pipes and drank their grog in one another's bar- 
parlours. So, yet wondering and undecided, I passed through 
Highgate Archway — where no man offered to swear me — 
and came to the turnpike, where I saw a lamentable illustra- 
tion of the hardness of the times, in the turnpike-man being 
obliged to take toll in kind ; letting a costermonger and a 
donkey-cart through for vegetables ; and a small boy, going 
Islington- wards, for an almost bladeless knife. 

Where is Cranbourne Alley ? where that delightful maze of 
dirty, narrow, little thoroughfares, leading from Leicester 
Square to St. Martin's Lane ? There was an alley of bonnet- 
shops — behind whose dusty windows faded Tuscans and 
Leghorns were visible, and at the doors of which stood 
women, slatternly in appearance, but desperate and accom- 
plished touters. Man, woman, or child, it was all the same to 
them ; if they had made up their minds that you were to buy 
a bonnet, buy one you were obliged to do, unless gifted with 
rare powers for withstanding passionate persuasion and awful 
menace. Piteous stories were told of feeble-minded old 
gentlemen emerging from the ' courts,' half-fainting, laden 
with bonnet-boxes, and minus their cash, watches, and jewel- 
lery, which they had left behind them, in part payment for 
merchandise which they had bought, or had been compelled 
to buy. The Lowther Arcade was not built in those days ; 
and, in Cranbourne Alley, there were toy-shops, and cheap 
jewellery warehouses, and magazines for gim cracks of every 
description. Moreover, in Cranbourne Alley was there not 
Hamlet's — not Hamlet the Dane, but Hamlet, the silversmith ! 
How many times have I stood, wondering, by those dirty 
windows, when I ought to have been wending my way to 
Mr. Wackerbarth's seminary for young gentlemen ! Peering 
into the dim obscurity, dimly making out stores of gigantic 
silver dish-covers, hecatombs of silver spoons and forks — 



THINGS DEPAETED. 61 

Pelions upon Ossas of race-cups and church services, — Hamlet 
was. to me, a synonyine with boundless wealth, inexhaustible 
credit, the payment of Consols — the grandeur of commercial 
Britain, in fact. Hamlet, Cranbourne Alley, and the Consti- 
tution ! Yet Cranbourne Alley and Hamlet are both things 
departed. 

In the shops in this neighbourhood they sold things which 
have long since floated down the sewer of Lethe into the 
liver of Limbo. AY hat has become of the tinder-box ? — the 
box we never could find when we wanted it ; the tinder that 
wouldn't light ; the flint and steel that wouldn't agree to 
strike a light till we had exhausted our patience, and chipped 
numerous small pieces of skin and flesh from our fingers ? 
Yet Bacon wrote his 4 Novum Organum,' and Blackstone his 
' Commentaries/ by tinder-box-lighted lamps : and Guy Fawkes 
was very nearly blowing up the Legislature with a tinder- 
box-lighted train. The tinder-box is gone now ; and, in its 
place, we have sinister-looking splints, made from chopped-up 
coffins ; which, being nibbed on sand-paper, send forth a 
diabolical glare, and a suffocating smoke. But they do not 
fail, like the flint and steel, and light with magical rapidity ; 
so, as everybody uses them, I am obliged to do so too. 

And, while I speak of lights and smoke, another thing 
departed comes before me. There is no such a thing as a 
pipe of tobacco now-a-days, sir. I see English gentlemen go 
about smoking black abominations like Irish apple- women. I 
hear of Milo's, Burns' cutty-pipes, Narghiles, Chiboucks, 
meerschaums, hookahs, water pipes, straw pipes, and a host of 
other inventions for emitting the fames of tobacco. But 
where, sir, is the old original alderman pipe, the church- 
warden's pipe, the unadulterated ; yard of clay ?' A man was 
wont to moisten the stem carefully with beer ere he put it to 
his lips : when once it was alight, it kept alight ; a man could 
sit behind that pipe, but can a man sit behind the ridiculous 
figments they call pipes now ? The yard of clay is departed, 
A dim shadow of it lingers sometimes in the parlours of old 
city taverns ; I met with it once in the Bull Eing at Birming- 
ham. I have heard of it in Chester: but in its entirety, as a 
popular, acknowledged pipe, it must be numbered with the 
things that were. 

TV here are the franks ? I do not allude to the warlike race 
of Northmen, who, under the sway of Pharamond, first gave 
France its name ; neither do I mean those individuals who, 



62 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

rejoicing in the appellation of Francis, are willing to accept 
the diminutive of Frank — 1 mean those folded sheets of letter- 
paper, which, being endorsed with the signature of a peer, or 
of a Member of Parliament, went thenceforward post-free. 
There were regular frank-hunters — men who could nose a 
Member who had not yet given all his franks away, with a 
scent as keen as ever Cuban bloodhound had for negro flesh. 
He would give chase in the lobby; run down the doomed 
legislator within the very shadow of the Sergeant-at- Arms' 
bag- wig ; and, after a brief contest, unfrank him on the spot. 
They were something to look at, and something worth having, 
those franks, when the postage to Edinburgh was thirteen- 
pence. But the franks are gone — gone with the procession of 
the mail-coaches on the first of May ; they have fallen before 
little effigies of the sovereign, printed in red, and gummed at 
the back. English Members of Parliament have no franks 
now ; and the twenty-five (though of a metallic nature) 
allowed, till very lately, to the Members of the French Legis- 
lature, have even been abolished. 

I never think of franks without a regretful remembrance of 
another thing departed — a man who, in old times, stood on 
the steps of the Post-office in St. Martin's le Grand, with a 
sheet of cartridge-paper, and whom I knew by the appellation 
of ' it forms. 5 ' It forms,' he was continually saying, ' now it 
forms a jockey-cap, now a church-door, a fan, a mat, the 
paddle-boxes of a steamer, a cocked hat ;' and, as he spoke, he 
twisted the paper into something bearing a resemblance to 
the articles he named. He is gone ; so is the sheet of fool's- 
cap we used to twist into the semblance of cocked hats, silk- 
worm-boxes, and boats, when boys at school. The very secret 
of the art is lost in these degenerate days, I verily believe, 
like that of making Venetian bezoar, or staining glass for 
windows. 

Whole hosts of street arts and street artists are among the 
things departed. Where is the dancing bear, with his piteous 
brown muzzle and uncouth gyrations? Where is the camel ? 
Where the tight-rope dancers ? the performers on stilts ? 
Where are these gone ? Say not that the New Police Act has 
abolished them ; for though that sweeping piece of legislation 
has silenced the dustman's bell, and bade the muffin-boy cry 
muffins no more, we have still the organ-grinders with, or 
without, monkeys, the Highland bagpipes, and the acrobats. 
The fantoccinis are almost extinct; and I suppose Punch 



THINGS DEPARTED. 63 

will go next. It is all very well, and right, and proper, of 
course. Dancing bears and camels, monkeys and fantoccinis, 
are all highly immoral, no doubt ; but I should just like to 
see what the British Constitution would be without Punch and 
Judy. 

The small-coal man is gone ; the saloop stall ; the blind 
man and his dog are becoming rarce aves ; the grizzled Turk 
with a dirty turban, and a box of rhubarb before him, is 
scarcely ever to be met with. In his stead we have a liver- 
coloured Lascar, shivering in white cotton robes, selling tracts 
of the inflammatory order of Piety, and occasionally offering 
them in exchange for gin. Age, caprice, the encouragement 
of new favourites, are driving these old-established ornaments 
of the streets away. 

I do not quarrel so much with the ever-changing fashions 
in dress. I can give up without a sigh the leg-of-mutton 
sleeves, those dreadful pear-shaped monsters of silk and 
muslin, they wore about the year '30. I will not clamour for 
the revival of the bishop's sleeves — unwieldy articles that 
were always either getting squashed flat as a pancake in a 
crowd, or dipping into the gravy at dinner. I will resign the 
monstrous Leghorn hats — the short-waisted pelisses, the Cos- 
sack trousers, and flaming stocks in which we arrayed our- 
selves, when George the Fourth was king ; but let me drop 
one tear, heave one sigh, to the memories of pig-tails and 
Hessian boots. 

Both are things departed. One solitary pig-tail, I believe, 
yet feebly flourishes in some remote corner of the agricultural 
districts of England. It comes up to town during the season ; 
and I have seen it in New Burlington Street. The Hessians, 
though gone from the lower extremities of a nation, yet find 
abiding place on the calves of the Stranger in Mr. Kotzebue's 
play of that name, and over the portals of some bootmakers of 
the old school. The Hessians of our youth are gone. The 
mirror-polished, gracefully- outlined, silken-tasselled Hes- 
sians exist no more — those famous boots, the soles of which 
Mr. Brummel caused to be blacked, and in the refulgent 
lustre of which the gentleman of fashion immortalised by 
Mr. Warren was wont to shave himself. 

Of the buildings, the monuments, the streets, which are 
gone, I will not complain. I can spare that howling desert in 
the area of Leicester Fields, with its battered railings, its cat- 
haunted parterres, its gravel walks, usurped by snails, and 



64 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

overgrown with weeds. I like Mr. Wyld's Great Globe better. 
I can dispense with the old Mews of Charing Cross, and the 
bill-covered hoarding surrounding thein, though I loved the 
latter, for the first announcement of the first play I ever saw 
was pasted there. I like Trafalgar Square (barring the 
fountains) better. I can surrender the horrible collection of 
mangy sheds, decomposed vegetables, and decaying baskets, 
which used to block up Farringdon Street, and which they 
called Fleet Market. I can renounce, though with a sigh, the 
Fleet Prison, acquiesce in the superiority of New Oxford Street 
over St. Giles's and the Holy Land, and of Victoria Street, as 
compared with the dirt and squalor and crime of Westminster. 
Yet, let me heave one sigh for King's Cross, that anomalous 
little area where many roads converge, and many monuments 
have stood. There was a stone monster, an adamantine Guy 
Fawkes, which was traditionally supposed to represent George 
the good, the magnificent, the great ; his curly wig, his portly 
mien, his affable countenance. Little boys used to chalk 
their political opinion freely on the pedestal, accompanied by 
rough cartoons of their parents and guardians, their pastors 
and masters ; omnibus drivers and conductors pointed the 
finger of hilarity at it, as they passed by ; it was a great 
statue. They have taken it away, with the Small-pox Hos- 
pital into the bargain, and though they have set up another 
George, stirrupless, hatless, and shoeless, in Trafalgar Square, 
and the Hospital is removed elsewhere, the terminus of the 
Great Northern Eailway, and the pedestal with three big 
lamps now standing in their stead, are a dis-sight to mine 
eyes, and make me long for the old glories of King's Cross and 
Battle Bridge. 

Smithfield is going. Tyburn is gone (I am not such an old 
fogy, Mr. Squrrel, as to be able to remember that; nor so 
stanch a Conservative as to regret it, now that it is gone). 
Bartholomew Fair is gone. Greenwich Fair going. Chalk 
Farm Fair a melancholy mockery of merriment. Let me ask 
a few more interrogations, and let me go too. 

Where are the fogs ? Light brumous vapours I see hang- 
ing over London, in December ; but not the fogs of my youth. 
They were orange-coloured, substantial, palpable fogs, that 
you could cut with a knife, or bottle up for future inspection. 
In those fogs vessels ran each other down on the river ; link- 
boys were in immense request ; carriages and four drove into 
chemists' shops and over bridges ; and in the counting-house 



THINGS DEPARTED. 65 

of Messrs. Bingo, Man dingo, and Flamingo, where I was a 
small boy, copying letters, we burnt candles in the battered old 
sconces all day long. I saw a fog, a real fog, the other clay, 
travelling per rail from Southampton ; but it was a white 
one, and gave me more the idea of a balloon voyage than of 
the fog de facto. 

Gone with the fogs are the link-boys, the sturdy, impudent 
varlets, who beset you on murky nights with their flaming 
torches, and the steady-going, respectable, almost aristocratic 
link-bearers, with silver badges often, who had the monopoly 
of the doors of the opera, and of great men's houses, when 
balls or parties were given. I knew a man once who was in 
the habit of attending the nobility's entertainments, not by the 
virtue of an invitation, but by the grace of his own indomi- 
table impudence, and by the link-boys' favour. An evening 
costume, an unblushing mien, and a crown to the link-boy, 
would be sufficent to make that worthy bawl out his name 
and style to the hall-porter ; the hall-porter would shout it to 
the footman; the footman yell it to the groom of the chambers ; 
while the latter intoning it for the benefit of the lady or 
gentleman of the house, those estimable persons would take it 
for granted that they must have invited him; and so bowing 
and complimenting, as a matter of course, leave him 
without restriction to his devices, in the way of dancing, 
flirting, ecarte playing, and supper-eating. Few and far 
between are the link-boys in this present 1859. The running 
footmen with the flambeaux have vanished these many years ; 
and the only mementos surviving of their existence are the 
blackened extinguishers attached to the area railings of some 
old-fashioned houses about Grosvenor Square. With the 
flambeaux, the sedan-chairs have also disappeared ; the drunken 
Irish chairmen who carried them ; the whist-loving old 
spinsters, who delighted to ride inside them. I have seen 
disjecta membra — venerable ruins, here and there, of the sedan- 
chairs at Bath, at Cheltenham, at Brighton ; but the bones 
thereof are marrowless, and its eyes without speculation. 

The old articles of furniture that I loved, are things 
departed. The mirror, with its knobby gilt frame, and 
stunted little branches for candles, the podgy eagle above it, 
and its convex surface reflecting your face in an eccentric and 
distorted manner ; the dumb waiter, ugly and useful ; the 
dear old spinnet, on which aunt Sophy used to play those 
lamentable pieces of music, the ' Battle of Prague ' and the 

F 



66 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

' Calipli of Bagdad;'* the old chefibnnier, the 'whatnot,' and 
the ' Canterbury;' the workbox, with a view of the Pavilion 
at Brighton on the lid ; the Tunbridge ware, (supplanted now 
by vile, beautifully-painted, artistic things of papier-mache, 
from Birmingham, forsooth,) — gone, and for ever. 

Even while I talk, whole crowds of ' things departed ' flit 
before me, of which I have neither time to tell, nor you 
patience to hear. Post-boys, ' wax-ends from the palace/ 
Dutch-pugs, black footmen, the window-tax, the Palace Court, 
Gatton, and Old Sarum ! What will go next, I wonder? 
Temple Bar, Lord Mayor's Day,f or the ' Gentleman's Maga- 
zine ?' 

Well, well : it is all for the best, I presume. The trivial 
things that I have babbled of, have but departed with the 
leaves and the melting snow — with the hopes that are ex- 
tinguished, and the ambition that is crushed — with dear old 
friends dead, and dearer friendships severed. I will be con- 
tent to sit on the milestone by the great road, and, smoking 
my pipe, watch the chariot of life, with Youth on the box and 
Pleasure in the dicky, tear by till the dust thrown up by its 
wheels has whitened my hair, and it shall be my time to be 
numbered among the things departed. 



' VI. 

PHASES OF ' PUBLIC ' LIFE. 
CHAPTER I. 

When the race of this huge London World-City shall be run 
— when the millstone shall have been cast into its waters, 
and the word has gone forth that Babylon the great is fallen, 
is fallen — when the spider shall weave his web amidst the 
broken columns of the Bank ; the owl shriek through the 
deserted arcades of the Exchange ; and the jackal prowl 
through labyrinths of ruins and rubbish, decayed oyster- shells 
and bleached skeletons of the dogs of other days, where once 
was Eegent Street — 1 should very much like to know what 
the ' Central Australian Society for the Advancement of 
Science,' or the ' Polynesian Archaeological Association,' or 
the ' Imperial New Zealand Society of Antiquaries,' would be 
likely to make of a great oblong board which glares at me 

* Temporarily resuscitated lately. 

f It is well nigh gone. The man in armour is a myth, and his place 
knows him no more. 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 67 

through the window at which I am writing this present paper 
— a board some five-and-twenty feet in length perchance, 
painted a bright resplendent blue, and on which are em- 
blazoned in glittering gold the magic words, ' Barclay, Perkins, 
and Co.'s Entire.' 

One of these boards will, perchance, be disinterred by 
some persevering savant from a heap of the relics of old 
London antiquities ; wheel-less, shaft-less, rotting Hansom's 
cabs, rusted chimney-cowls, turnpike-gates of ancient fashion 
and design, gone-by gas-lamps and street-posts. And the 
savant will doubtless imagine that he will find in the mysterious 
board — the once glittering characters — some sign, some key, 
to the secret freemasonry, some shibboleth of the old London 
world. Learned pamphlets will be written, doubtless, to 
prove a connection between Barclay and Perkins and Captain 
Barclay the pedestrian, and Perkins' steam-gun, who and 
which, joined together by some Siamese bond of union, be- 
came thenceforth and for ever one entire 'Co.' Other sages, 
haply, will have glimmering notions that Barclay and Perkins 
have something to do with a certain X.X.X. : others stoutly 
maintain that the words formed but Christian and surnames, 
common among the inhabitants of old London, even as were 
the well-known { Smiths.' and the established ' Jones.' ' Y\"e 
know.'" they will say. ; that the great architect of the most 
famous buildings in eld London was called " Voluntary Con- 
tributions ;" we know that a majority of the citizens of that 
bygone city were addicted to the creed of Zoroaster, or sun- 
worship ; for we find on the ruins of their houses votive 
plates of brass, of circular form, bearing an effigy of the sun, 
with a reference to fire-insurance — these things have been 
demonstrated by learned doctors and professors of ability; 
why may we not, then, assume that Barclay and Perkins were 
names possessed in an astonishingly prolific degree by London 
citizens, who. proud of belonging to so respectable a family, 
were in the habit of blazoning the declaration of their lineage 
in blue and gold on an oblong board, and affixing the same 
to the front of their houses?' The Emperor of China has 
upwards of five thousand cousins, who are distinguished from 
the tag-rag and bobtail of the Celestial Empire by wearing 
yellow girdles. 'Why, 3 these sages will ask. -may not the parent 
Barclay Perkins have been a giant, blessed with hundreds of 
arrows in his quiver, whose thousand thousand descendants 
were proud to be clad like him in a liverv of blue and gold ?' 

f 2 



68 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Then the sages will squabble, and wrangle, and call each 
other bad names, and write abusive diatribes against each 
other by magnetic telegraph, just as other sages' were wont to 
squabble and wrangle about the Rosetta Stone, the Source of 
the Niger, and Brace's discoveries ; or, as they do now, about 
the North- West Passage and the percement of the Isthmus of 
Suez, the causes of the cholera and diphtheria, and the possibi- 
lity of aerial navigation. As it has been, so it is, and will be, 
I suppose ; and if we can't agree nowadays, so shall we, or 
rather our descendants, disagree in times to come, and con- 
cerning matters far less recondite or abstruse than Barclay 
Perkins. 

i" know what Barclay and Perkins mean, I hope ; — what 
Combe and Delafield — what Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton — 
what Calvert and Co. — what Eeid and Co. — what Bass — what 
Allsopp — what Broadwood, Mundell, and Huggins. You know, 
too, gentle, moderate, and bibulous reader of the present age. 
They all mean Beek. Beer, the brown, the foaming, the 
wholesome, and refreshing, when taken in moderation; the 
stupifying, and to-station-house-leading, when imbibed ^to 
excess. That oblong board, all blue and gold, I have spoken 
of as visible from my parlour window, has no mystery for 
me. Plainly, unmistakably, it says Beer : a good tap ; four- 
pence a pot in the pewter ; threepence per ditto if sent for in 
your own jug. 

And if you admit (and you will admit, or you are no true 
Englishman) that beer be good — and, being good, that we 
should be ^ thankful for it — can you tell me any valid reason 
why I should not write on the subject of Beer ? Seeing how 
many thousands of reputable persons there are throughout the 
country who live by the sale of beer, and how many millions 
drink it,— seeing that beer is literally in everybody's mouth, 
it strikes me we should not ignore beer taken in its relation 
towards the belles lettres. Tarry with me, then, while I 
discourse on Beer— on the sellers and the buyers thereof— 
and of their habitations. I will essay to navigate my little 
bark down a river of beer, touching, perchance, at some little 
spirit-creek, or gently meandering through the * back-waters ' 
of neat wines. 

When the Spanish student — immortalised by Le Sage —was 
inducted into the mysteries of the private life of Madrid, he 
availed himself of a temporary aerial machine, in a person of 
diabolical extraction, called Asmodeus — who further assisted 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 69 

him in his bird's-eye inspection, by taking the roofs off the 
houses. When the nobility and gentry frequenting the 
fashionable circles of the Arabian Nights, were desirous of 
travelling with extraordinary rapidity, they were sure to be 
accommodated with magical carpets, or swift-flying eagles, or 
winged horses. Then they could be rendered invisible, or 
provided with telescopes, enabling them to see through every 
obstacle, from stone walls to steel castles ; but things are 
changed, and times are altered now. One can't go from 
London to Liverpool without buying a railway-ticket, and 
being importuned to show it half a dozen times in the course 
of the journey. If you want to study character in the Stock 
Exchange, you can get no more invisible suit to do it in than 
a suit of invisible green, and run, moreover, the risk of 
hearing a howl of '201 !' and feeling two hundred pair of 
hands, and two hundred pair of feet to match, bonneting, 
buffeting, hustling, and kicking you from the high place of 
Mammon. 

So, then, in the stud}' of Beer and Beerhouses, I have had 
no adventitious aid from accommodating demons, obliging 
genii, invisible caps, carpets, or cloaks. ' Experientia' '—you 
know the rest. I have graduated in Beer ; I have mastered 
its mysteries ; and I will now assume, for your benefit, a 
magic power, which I devoutly wish I had possessed during 
my Beery researches. Come with me, then, in the spirit, to 
Bankside ; and, after a cursory stroll round the fountain-head 
of beer, let us seat ourselves (still in the spirit) at the tail of 
one of these big drays, drawn by big horses, and, fearing no 
cries of ' whip behind !' from jealous boys (for, being spiritual, 
we are, of course, invisible), perambulate the metropolis, rapt 
in the contemplation of Beer. Surrounded with Barclay and 
Perkins's beer-barrels, our steeds conducted by Barclay and 
Perkins's red night-capped draymen, we will go in this, our 
magic chariot, from public -house to public-house : ' The latent 
tracks, the giddy heights explore ;' i shoot folly as it flies, 
and catch the manners living as they rise ;' attempt a mild 
classification of the peculiar social characteristics of 'the 
different metropolitan 'publics;' give, in short, a view and a 
description, however lame and incomplete it may be, of 
* London on Tap.' 

I do not purpose, in these pages, at least, to enter minutely 
into the consideration of the aspect of a London Brewery, 
or of the manufacture of the great English beverage ; so. then, 
our stay will be but short in this huge biick beer emporium. 



70 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

I make remark, en passant, that an odour prevails in and about 
the establishment, resembling an amalgamation of several 
washing-days, a few cookshops, and a stable' or two. To 
cursory spectators, such as yon and I are, the brewery will 
offer very little besides this, and a general impression of 
' bigness,' length, height, breadth, rotundity. The premises 
are large, the vats are large ; the stables, the strong, stalwart 
horses, the provisions of hay and straw, of malt and hops, of 
smoke and steam, are all large. Large, also, to almost Titanic 
extensiveness, are the draymen — gladiators of the Beery 
arena, with Phrygian caps of scarlet hue, and wide-spread 
leathern aprons. Large are their labours; larger still, their 
appetites ; largest and mightiest of all, their thirst of beer. 
Grocers and pastry-cooks, they say, give their apprentices 
and shopmen the run of all the delicacies they deal in, for the 
first month of their service — carte blanche to the plums, and 
figs, and tarts, of which — to the ultimate benefit of the 
tradesman — they speedily get very sick and tired ; but with 
the drayman-neophyte it seems quite different ; for I never 
heard — nor, did I hear, should I credit the assertion — that any 
of Barclay and Perkins's men ever got tired of Barclay and 
Perkins's tap. Largely impressed, therefore, with their per- 
vading largeness, we will leave the brewhouse for the present. 

Privately, we may be allowed, and confidentially, to 
surmise, that the profits of the proprietors are also large — 
very large, indeed : but goodness forbid that we should 
venture to hint (aloud, at least) that the prices they demand 
and obtain for beer are large, and — considering malt, and 
hops, and grain, and Free Trade, and that sort of thing — a 
great deal too large, and not quite just. 

The heavy wheels of our chariot have been rumbling, 
while I spoke, through the great thoroughfare which com- 
mences at Charing Cross, and ends at Mile End — somewhere 
about where there was, once on a time, a Maypole. It 
diverges, going westward; and we are in a trice in a 
street, in which / never was in a vehicle in my life without 
being blocked up, and in which, in the present instance, we 
are comfortably wedged with a timber-laden waggon, a hearse, 
and an advertising-van in front, and a Hansom cab or two, 
a mail-phaeton, and Mr. Ex-Sheriff Pickles's elegant chariot 
behind. Leaving the respective drivers to exchange com- 
pliments, couched in language more or less parliamentary, we 
will descend for a moment — for the neighbourhood is thickly 
studded with public-houses — and we shall have time, ere our 



PHAGES OF "' PUBLIC LIFE. 71 

chariot be extricated, to investigate numerous varieties of 
* London on Tap.' 

Here, first — blatant, gay, and gaudy — is a Gix Palace — a 
1 ginnery,' in full swing, 

The Palladio or the Yitruvius who built this palace, has 
curiously diversified the orders of architecture in its construc- 
tion. We have Doric shafts vrith Corinthian capitols — an 
Ionic frieze — Benaissance panels — a Gothic screen to the bar- 
parlour. But French polish and gilding cover a multitude of 
(architectural) sins : and there is certainly no lack of either 
the one or the other here. Tier above tier surround the- 
walls, supporting gigantic casks, bearing legends of a fabulous 
number of gallons contained within. Yet are they not 
dummies ; for we may observe spiral brass pipes, wriggling 
and twisting in snake-like contortions till they reach the 
bar, and so to the spirit-taps, where they bring the costly 
hogshead of the distiller home to the lips of the humblest 
costermonger, for a penny a glass. Beer is sold, and in con- 
siderable cpantities — a halfpenny a pint cheaper, too, than at 
other hostelries ; but it is curious beer — beer of a half-sweet, 
half-acrid taste, black to the sight, unpleasant to the taste, 
brown in the froth, muddy in consistence. Has it been in 
delicate health, and can that shabby old man, in close confab 
with the landlord at the door, at the steps of the cellar, be 
the • Doctor V Or has it been adulterated, ' fined,' doctored, 
patched, and cobbled up. for the amusement and instruction 
of amateurs in beer — like steam-frigates, for instance, or Acts 
of Parliament ? 

The area before the bar. you will observe, is very spacions. 
At this present second hour of the afternoon, there are, 
perhaps, fifty people in it : and it would hold, I dare say, 
full twenty more, and allow space, into the bargain, for a neat 
stand-up fight. One seems very likely to take place now 
between the costermonger, who has brought rather an incon- 
venient number of ' kea-rots ' and ; turmtus ' into the bar with 
him., and a peripatetic vendor of fish — the quality of whose 
wares he has (with some show of justice, perhaps) impugned. 
So imminent does the danger appear, that the blind match- 
seller — who was anon importuning the belligerents — hastily 
scuttles off: and an imp of a boy. in a man's fustian jacket, 
and with a dirty red silk 'kerchief twisted round his bull 
neck, has mounted the big tub. on which he sits astride, pipe 
in hand — a very St. Giles's Bacchus — declaring that he will 
see 'fair play.' Let us edge away a little towards the bar — 



72 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

for the crowd towards the door is somewhat too promiscuous 
to be agreeable ; and it is not improbable that in the melee, 
some red-'kerchiefed citizen, of larger growth, Whose extensor 
and flexor muscles are somewhat more powerfully developed, 
may make a savage assault on you, for his own private gratifi- 
cation, and the mere pleasure of hitting somebody. 

This ginnery has not only a bar public, but divers minor 
cabinets, bibulous loose boxes, which are partitioned off from 
the general area ; and the entrances to which are described in 
flowery, but somewhat ambiguous language. There is the 
* Jug and Bottle Entrance,' and the entrance ' For Bottles 
only.' There is the 'Wholesale Bar,' and the ' Eetail Bar;' 
but, wholesale or retail, jug or bottle, the different bars all 
mean Gin ! The long pewter counter is common to all. 
A counter perforated in elaborately-pricked patterns, like a 
convivial shroud, apparently for ornament, but really for the 
purpose of allowing the drainings, overflowings, and out- 
spill ings of the gin-glasses to drop through, which, being 
collected with sundry washings, and a dash, perhaps, of 
fresh material, is, by the thrifty landlord, dispensed to his 
customers under the title of ' all sorts.' Your dram-drinker, 
look you, is not unfrequently paralytic, wofully shaky in the 
hand ; and the liquor he wastes, combined with that acci- 
dentally spilt, tells up wonderfulty at the close of the year. 
There are cake-baskets on the counter, patronised mostly by 
the lady votaries of the rosy (or livid ?) god ; but their tops 
are hermetically sealed, and their dulcet contents protected 
by a wire dome, or cupola, of convex form. Besides what I 
have described, if you will add some of my old friends the 
gold-blazoned boards, bearing the eulogies of various brewers, 
together with sundry little placards, framed and glazed, and 
printed in colours, telling, in seductive language, of ' Choice 
Compounds/ ' Old Tom,' ' Cream of the Valley,' ' Superior 
Cream Gin,' < The Eight Sort,' < Kinahan's L.L.,' < The Dew 
off Ben Nevis,' the ' Celebrated Balmoral Mixture, patronised 
by his Eoyal Highness Prince Albert ' (the illustrious person- 
age, clad in full Highland costume, with an extensive herd of 
red deer in the distance, is represented taking a glass of the 
' Mixture ' with great apparent gusto) ; besides these, I 
repeat, you will need nothing to ' complete the costume,' as 
the romancers have it, of a Gin Palace. 

Except the landlord, perhaps, who is bald and corpulent, 
who has a massive watch-chain, and a multiplicity of keys, 
and whose hands seem to leave the pockets of his trousers as 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC' LIFE. 73 

seldom as his keen eye does the gin-drawing gymnastics of 
his barmen. Gymnastics they are, tours deforce, feats of calis- 
thenics as agile as any performed by the agile professor whom 
I have just seen pass, all dirt, flesh-coloured drawers, and 
spangles. A quick, sharp, jerking twist for the spirit tap, 
allowing to run till the liquor is within a hair's breadth of 
the top of the measure, and no longer ; a dexterous tilt of the 
'two,' or 'three out' glasses required; an agile shoving for- 
ward of the pewter noggin with one hand, while the other 
inevitable palm is presented for the requisite halfpence ; and 
oh ! such a studious carefulness that one hand is not emptied 
before the other is filled. It is not everybody can serve in 
the bar of a Gin Palace. The barman wears a fur cap — gene- 
rally — sometimes a wide-awake. He is addicted to carrying 
a piece of straw, a pipe-light, or the stalk of a flower in his 
mouth, diversifying it occasionally by biting half-crowns 
viciously. When he gives you change, he slaps it down on 
the counter in a provocatory manner ; his face is flushed ; his 
manner short, concise, sententious. His vocabulary is limited ; 
a short ' Xow then,' and a brief ' Here you are,' forming the 
staple phrases thereof. I wonder what his views of human 
nature — of the world, its manners, habits, and customs — can 
be like. Or what does the barmaid think of it ? I should 
like to know : the young lady in the coal-black ringlets (like 
magnified leeches), the very brilliant complexion, and the 
coral necklace. Mercy on us ! what can she, a girl of eighteen, 
think of the faces, the dress, the language of the miserable 
creatures among whom she spends sixteen hours of her life 
every day — every mortal day throughout the year — once in 
every three weeks (her c day out ') excepted ? 

One word about the customers, and we will rejoin our 
chariot, which must surely be extricated by this time. 
Thieves, beggars, costermongers, hoary-headed old men, 
stunted, ragged, shock-haired children, blowzy, slatternly 
women, hulking bricklayers, gaunt, sickly hobbedehoys, with 
long greasy hair. A thrice-told tale. Is it not the same 
everywhere ! The same pipes, dirt, howling, maundering, 
fighting, staggering gin fever. Like plates multiplied by the 
electro-process — like the printer's ' stereo ' — like the reporter's 
1 manifold '• — you will find duplicates, triplicates of these for- 
lorn beings everywhere. The same woman giving her baby 
gin; the same haggard, dishevelled woman, trying to coax 
her drunken husband home; the same mild girl, too timid 



74 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

even to importune her ruffian partner to leave off drinking the 
week's earnings, who sits meekly in a corner, with two dis- 
coloured eyes, one freshly blacked — one of a week's standing. 
The same weary little man, who comes in early, crouches in 
a corner, and takes standing naps during the day, waking up 
periodically for ' fresh drops.' The same red-nosed, ragged 
object who disgusts you at one moment by the force and 
fluency of his Billingsgate, and surprises you the next by 
bursting out in Greek and Latin quotations. The same thin, 
spectral man who has no money, and with his hands piteously 
laid one over the other, stands for hours gazing with fishy 
eyes at the beloved liquor — smelling, thinking of, hopelessly 
desiring it. And lastly, the same miserable girl, sixteen in 
years, and a hundred in misery ; with foul, matted hair, and 
death in her face ; with a tattered plaid shawl, and ragged 
boots, a gin-and-fog voice, and a hopeless eye. 

Mr. Ex-Sheriff Pickles's carriage no longer stops the way, 
and the big draymen have conducted the big horses and the 
big cLray to its destination. Beer has to be delivered at the 
sign of the 'Green Hog Tavern;' whither, if you have no 
objection, we will forthwith hie. 

The Green Hog is in a tortuous, but very long street — a 
weak-minded street indeed, for it appears unable to decide 
whether to go to the right or to the left, straight or zig-zag, 
to be broad or to be narrow. The Green Hog participates in 
this indecision of character. It evidently started with the 
intention of having a portico, but stopping short, compromised 
the matter by overshadowing the street door with a hideous 
excrescence between a verandah, a ' bulk,' and a porch. Con- 
tradictory, also, is the Green Hog ; for it calls itself, over the 
door, the Green Hog Tavern, over the window, a Wine Vaults, 
and round the corner (in the Mews) a Spirit Stores. The bar 
is shamefaced, having run away to the end of a long passage ; 
and even then, when you do get to it, is more like a bow- 
window than like a bar, and more like a butler's pantry than 
either. Very few customers do you see standing at the bar of 
the Green Hog; yet does its verdant porcinity considerable 
business with Barclay Perkins. 

The truth is, the Green Hog is one of a class of publics, 
becoming rapidly extinct in London. It is a tavern — one of 
the old, orthodox, top-booted, sanded-floored taverns. It does 
a good business, not by casual beer-drinkers, but in ' lunch, 
dinner, and supper beers.' A better business, perhaps, in 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC' LIFE. 75 

wines and dinners; for to the Green Hog resort a goodly 
company of the customers of the ' old school,' — men who yet 
adhere to the traditional crown bowl of punch, and the his- 
torical ' rump and dozen,' who take their bottle of wine after 
dinner, and insist upon triangular spittoons. They are behind 
the times, perhaps, and the Green Hog is a little behind them 
too. The Green Hog can't make out competition, and new 
inventions, and fresh blood, and new resources. ' My father 
kept this house afore me,' says the Green Hog, ' and my son'll 
keep it after me.' So, within his orthodox and time-honoured 
precincts, a ' go' of sherry is still called a bottle of sherry — a 
glass of brandy and water is charged a shilling. ' Bell's Old 
Weekly Messenger ' is taken in ; and the Green Hog goes to 
bed at midnight — winter or summer — week-day or Sabbath. 

The parlour (or common room) of the Green Hog is a sight 
The ceiling is low and bulging, and is covered with a quiet, 
gray-patterned paper. There is a sanded floor, a big fireplace, 
' settles ' on either side thereof, long substantial tables, and a 
chair on a dais nailed against the wall. No newfangled por- 
traits hang on the walls, of race-horses, Eadical Members, of 
performers at the Theatres Eoyal. There is, however, Mr. 
Charles Young, in mezzotint, Eoman costume, and toga. 
There is the best of monarchs in jack-boots and a pig-tail, 
reviewing two hundred thousand volunteers in Hyde Park. 
There is the next best of monarchs in his curliest wig, smiling 
affably at the fur collar of his surtout. There is the portrait 
of the late landlord, and the portrait of the present one. 
There is, finally, Queen Caroline, looking deeply injured in 
an enormous hat and feathers, and an aquatint view of the 
opening of Blackfriars Bridge. 

To this comfortable and old-fashioned retreat come the 
comfortable and old-fashioned customers, who ' use ' the Green 
Hog. Hither comes Mr. Tuckard, a round old gentleman, 
supposed to be employed in some capacity at the Tower of 
London, but whether as a warder, an artillery-man, or a gen- 
tleman-gaoler — deponent sayeth not. He appears regularly at 
nine o'olock every morning, eats a huge meat-and-beer break- 
fast, orders his dinner, re-appears at six o'clock precisely, eats 
a hearty dinner, drinks a bottle of port, and smokes nine pipes 
of tobacco, washed down by nine tumblers of gin and water. 
He invariably finishes his nine tumblers just as John the 
waiter (of whom no man ever knew the surname, or saw the 
bow to his neck-tie) brings in tumbler of brandy and water, 



76 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

number four, for Mr. Scrayles, the eminent corn-chandler 
(reported to be worth a mint of money). The door being 
opened, Mr. Tuckard rises, looks round, nods, and without 
further parley, makes a bolt through the door and disappears. 
This, with but few interruptions , he has done daily and nightly 
for five-and-thirty years. He rarely speaks but to intimate 
friends (with whom he has had a nodding acquaintance for 
twenty years, perhaps). He occasionally condescends to im- 
part, in a fat whisper, his opinions about the funds and the 
weather. It is reported that he cannot read, for he never was 
known to take up a newspaper — that he cannot write — that 
he never sleeps. No one knows where he lives. He is 
Tuckard, employed in the Tower of London; that is all. 
Sometimes, on high days and holidays, he hands round a por- 
tentous golden snuff-box, purporting, from the engraving on 
its lid, to have been presented to Thomas Tuckard, Esquire, 
by his friends and admirers, members of the ' Cobb Club.' 
Who was Cobb ? and what manner of Club was his ? 

Besides the mysterious possessor of the snuff-box, and the 
wealthy coin-chandler, there are some score more grave and 
sedate frequenters of the parlour, all ' warm ' men, financially 
speaking, all quietly eloquent as to the funds and the weather, 
and all fond of their bottle of wine, and their tumbler of grog. 
Time and weather, changes of ministry, births, deaths, and 
marriages seem to have but little effect on them, nor to ruffle, 
in any sensible degree, the even tenour of their lives. They 
will continue, I have no doubt, to ' use ' the Green Hog as 
long as they are able to use anything ; and when the grog of 
life is drained, and the pipe of existence is extinguished, they 
will quietly give place to other old codgers, who will do, 
doubtless, as they did before them. 

Don't suppose that Barclay and Perkins's dray, or Barclay 
and Perkins's men have been idle or unprofitable emplo} 7 ed 
while I have been poking about the parlour of the Green Hog. 
No : theirs has been the task to raise the cellar-flap on the 
pavement, and to lower, by means of sundry chains and ropes, 
the mighty butts of beer required for the lunches, dinners, 
and suppers of the Green Hog's customers. Curious evolu- 
tions, both human and equestrian, were performed during the 
operation. Small boys took flying leaps over the prostrate 
barrels ; the stalwart steeds cut figures of eight in the narrow 
thoroughfare, occasionally backing into the chandler's shop 
opposite, to the imminent peril of the Dutch cheeses, balls of 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC' LIFE. 77 

twine, screws of tobacco, and penny canes there exposed to 
view, and the loudly-expressed consternation of the proprie- 
trix; the pavement on one side was rendered temporarily 
impassable by a barricade of tightly-strained cordage, and 
the otherwise equable temper of the servant-maid from 
Ko. 4, seriously ruffled, as, emerging from the door with a 
foaming jug of half-and-half, a dirty rope came right across 
her clean white stocking. Then, after all this, have the 
gigantic draymen rested and refreshed themselves. A tem- 
porary game of hide-and-seek has taken place— each red- 
capped butt-twister wandering about anxiously inquiring for 
his ' mate ;' but the lost have been found ; and, when from 
the dark and poky parlour we re-enter the bow-windowed bar 
(where the sweet -smelling thicket of lemons, and the punch- 
bowls, the punch-ladles, with William and Mary guineas- 
soldered in them, and the bright-eyed landlord's daughter are) 
— we find the mighty yeomen discussing huge dishes of beef- 
steaks and onions, and swallowing deep draughts from the 
Pierian spring of Barclay's best. 

Take with me, I entreat, a glass of Dutch bitters from that 
pot-bellied, quaint-shaped bottle with the City shield and 
dagger on it, for all the world like one of the flasks in 
Hogarth's Modern Midnight Conversation. Then as the 
draymen have finished their repast, and our chariot awaits us, 
let us sally forth into London again, and seek a fresh tap. 

What have we here? A pictorial 'public' Lithographic 
prints, wood engravings in the windows ; Highland gentlemen, 
asseverating, in every variety of attitude, that their names are 
Xorval — that their pedigrees are pastoral, and that their last 
past places of residence were the Grampian Hills ; Hamlet 
declaring his capacity to tell a hawk from a handsaw ; Job 
Thornbury vindicating the rights of the Englishman's fireside ; 
Lady Macbeth lamenting the inutility of all the perfumes of 
Arabia to sweeten ; this little hand ' — which looks large ; 
clowns bewailing the loss of a ' farden,' grinning hideously 
meanwhile — all as performed by Messieurs and Mesdames So- 
and-so, at the Theatres Boyal. The little glazed placards in 
the window, telling of chops, steaks, and Schweppe's soda- 
water, are elbowed, pushed from their stools, by cartoons of 
the ' Bounding Brothers of the Himalaya Mountains ;' Signor 
Scapino and his celebrated dog Jowler ; Herr Diavolo Buffo, 
the famous corkscrew equilibrist (from the Danube), and tight- 
rope dancer ; or Mademoiselle Smicherini the dancer, with 



75 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

undeniable silk fleshings, and very little else. Lower down, 
bills of theatrical benefits, tournaments at tea-gardens, 
6 readings ' from Shakspeare, and harmonic meetings dispute 
the pavement with the legitimate possessors of the soil — the 
brewers and distillers. Within is a grove — a forest rather, of 
play-bills, waving their red and black leaves in Vallambrosan 
density. Patent theatres, minor theatres, country theatres — 
even Transatlantic temples of the drama. This is a theatrical 
c public ' — a house of call for Thespians. Over the way is the 
Theatre Eoyal, Barbican ; round the corner, up the court and 
two pair of stairs, Mr. Wilfred Grin doff Belville, has his thea- 
trical agency office ; here meet the Sock and Buskin Club ; 
and here, in days gone by, the great Konks, the tragedian, 
was wont to imbibe that bottle and a half of gin, without the 
aid of which he disdained to perform his famous character of 
< The Bobber of the Hills.' 

To the theatrical public come the actors of the Theatre 
Eoyal, Barbican, their friends and acquaintances, being actors 
at other theatres, and that anomalous class of persons who 
hunt for orders, and scrape acquaintance with theatrical 
people, of which and of whom they afterwards discourse 
voluminously in the genteel circles. Hither, also, come 
comedians, dancers, and pantomimists who are for the time out 
of engagements, who have placed their names on Mr. W. Gr. 
Belville's ' list, 5 and expect situations through his agency. 
A weary-looking, heart-sick with hope deferred body they are. 
There, intently studying the bill of the Bowie-knife Theatre, 
New York, is Mr. Montmorency de Courcy (ne Snaggs) in a 
mulberry-coloured body-coat and gilt basket buttons, check 
trousers, and a white hat. He is from the Northern Circuit, 
and hopes, please the pigs and Mr. Belville, to do second low 
comedy in London yet, though he has been a long time ' out 
of collar.' At the door, you have Mr. Snartell, the low 
comedian from Devonport, and Mr. Eollocks, the heavy father 
from the Bath Circuit, who affects, in private life, a low- 
crowned hat with a prodigious brim (has a rich though some- 
what husky bass voice), and calls everybody ' My son.' These, 
with many more dark-haired, close-shaven, and slightly 
mouldily -habited inheritors of the mantles of Kean, Dowton, 
or Bianchard, wait the live-long day for the long-wished-for 
engagements. 

Inside, at the bar, Signor Scapino, in propria persona, is 
exercising his celebrated dog Jowler at standing on the hind 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 79 

legs, placing a halfpenny on the counter, and receiving a 
biscuit instead ; two or three stage-carpenters are enjoying 
themselves over the material used to ' grease the traps,' i. e. 
half a crown's worth of stimulants placed to their credit by 
the author of the last new piece over the way ; while the 
author himself, a mysterious individual in spectacles, and 
clutching an umbrella, eagerly scrutinizes the pile of country 
play-bills, in the hope of discovering among them some theatre 
at which one of his pieces has lately been performed, and on 
which he can be ' down ' for half a crown an act for each 
representation. Then there is a little prematurely-aged man, 
Doctor Snaffles, indeed, as he is called, who did the ' old man ' 
line of business, but who does very little to speak of now, 
except drink. Drink has been his bane through life ; has 
thrown him out of every engagement he ever had, has muddled 
his brain, rendered his talent a shame and a curse, instead of 
a credit and a blessing to him ; made him the ragged, decrepit, 
palsied beggar-man you see him now. He asks the barmaid 
piteously for a pinch of snuff, which she never refuses him — 
and returns him in addition, sometimes (when he can find no 
old theatrical friend to treat him) half a pint of porter. He is 
never seen to eat, and sleeps nowhere in particular, and has 
not washed within the memory of man. 

There's a little snuggery or private parlour behind the bar, 
to which are only free the actors of the adjacent theatre, of a 
certain standing, and their friends. In the intervals of re- 
hearsals before and after the performance this little snuggery 
is crammed. The heavy tragedian makes jokes that set the 
table in a roar, and the low comedian is very dismally and 
speechlessly drawing lines in beer with his finger on the 
Pembroke table. In the chimney corner sits Mr. Berrymax, 
a white-haired old gentleman, with a pleasant expression of 
countenance, who, though not an actor, enjoys prodigious con- 
sideration in the profession, as a play-goer of astonishing an- 
tiquity, who is supposed to remember Mrs. Bracegirdle, Peg 
"Woffington — nay Betterton, almost; whose opinions on all 
points of reading, business, and stage traditions, are looked upon 
as oracles, wdiose decisions are final, and whose word is law. 

The landlord of the theatrical public-house is, very 
probably, a retired actor — a prompter who has made a little 
money — or, sometimes, even an unsuccessful manager. His 
daughter may be in the ballet at the adjacent theatre ; or, 
perhaps, if he be a little 'warm,' she may have taken lessons 



80 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

from Signor Chiccarini, wear a black velvet dress, carry an 
oblong morocco music-case, like a leathern candle-box, and 
sing at the Nobility's Concerts, and in the choruses of Her 
Majesty's Theatre. There are other theatrical publics, 
varying however in few particulars from the one into which 
we have peeped. There is the 'public' over the water, 
whither the performers at the Eoyal Alexandrina Theatre 
(formerly the old Homborg) resort ; where Jobson, the 
original Vampire of Venice, reigns supreme, and where you 
may see a painted announcement, that — ' Bottles are lent for 
the Theatre,' meaning that any thirsty denizen of the New 
Cut, who may choose to patronise, on a given night, the Eoyal 
Alexandrina Theatre, with his wife, family, and suite, may 
here buy beer, and borrow a bottle to hold it, wherewith to 
regale himself between the acts, the standing order of the 
theatre as to 'No bottles allowed,' notwithstanding. Then 
there is the equestrian theatrical house, also, over the water, 
where you may see fiercely moustachioed gentlemen, who 
clank spurs, and flourish horsewhips, after the manner of life- 
guardsmen off duty ; who swear fearfully, and whose grammar 
is defective ; who affect a great contempt for actors, whom 
they term ' mummies,' and who should be in polite parlance 
denominated ' equestrian performers,' but are generally, by a 
discerning but somewhat too familiar public, known as ' horse- 
riders.' There are, of course, different cliques and coteries 
holding their little discussions, and conserving their little 
prejudices and antipathies, their likings and dislikings, in the 
various classes of theatrical publics ; but there is common to 
them all a floating population of old play-goers, superannuated 
pantomimists, decayed prompters, actors out of engagement, 
and order-hunters and actor-haunters. 

Kamble on again, wheels of Barclay's dray; clatter, ye 
harness, and crack, ye loud-sounding whips ; and let us leave 
the world theatrical for the world pictorial. Let us see the 
Arts on tap ! 

VII. 

PHASES OF ' PUBLIC' LIFE. 
CHAPTER II. 

In a suburban locality, mostly, shall you find the artistic 
public-house. There is nothing essentially to distinguish it 
from other houses of entertainment. Indeed, by day, were it 



PHASES OF < PUBLIC' LIFE. 81 

not for the presence, perhaps, of an old picture or two in the 
bar, and a bran-new sacred piece by young Splodger c Madonna 
col Bambino ' (models Mrs. Splodger and Master W. Splodger), 
with an intensely blue sky, a preternaturally fat Bambino, and 
a Madonna with a concentrated sugar-candyish sweetness of 
expression — were it not for these, you would be puzzled to 
discover that the arts had anything to do with this class of 
public. But after eight o'clock at night, or so, the smoking- 
room is thronged with artists, young and old : gray-headed 
professors of the old school, who remember Stothard, and have 
heard Fuseli lecture ; spruce young fellows who have studied 
in Paris, or have just come home from Italy, full of Horace 
Vernet, Paul Delaroche, the loggia and stanze of the Vatican, 
the Pitti Palace, and the Grand Canal; moody disciples of 
that numerous class of artists known as the ' great unappre- 
ciated,' who imagine that when they have turned their shirt- 
collars down, and their lips up, grown an enormous beard and 
moustache, and donned an eccentric felt hat, all is done that 
can be done by art, theoretical, practical, and aesthetical, and 
that henceforward it is a burning and crying shame if their 
pictures are not hung ' on the line ' in the Exhibition of the 
Eoyal Academy, or if the daily papers do not concur in a 
unanimous paean of praise concerning their performances. Very 
rarely condescends also to visit the artists' public that trans- 
cendent genius Mr. Cimabue Giotto Smalt, one of the P.P.P.B. 
or ' Prae-painting and Perspective Brotherhood.' Mr. Smalt, 
in early life, made designs for ' The Ladies' Gazette of Fashion.' 
and was suspected also of contributing the vigorous and 
Highly- coloured illustrations to ' The Hatchet of Horrors' — 
that excellent work published in penny numbers by Skull, of 
Horrorwell Street. Subsequently awakening, however, to a 
sense of the hollowness of the world, and the superiority of 
the early Italian school over all others, he laid in a large 
stock of cobalt, blue, gold leaf, small wooden German dolls, 
and glass eyes, and commenced that course of study which 
has brought him to the proud position he now holds as a de- 
votional painter of the most aesthetic acerbity and the most 
orthodox angularity. He carefully unlearned all the drawing 
and perspective which his kind parents had been at some 
trouble and expense to have him taught : he studied the 
human figure from his German dolls, expression from his col- 
lection of glass eyes, drapery from crumpled sheets of foolscap 
paper, colour from judiciously selected morceaux (m panel), such 

G 



82 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

as Barclay and Perkins's bine board, and the c Eed Lion 'at 
Brentford. He paints shavings beautifully, sore toes fault- 
lessly. In his great picture of St. Laurence, the bars of the 
gridiron, as branded on the saint's flesh, are generally con- 
sidered to be masterpieces of finish and detail. Some critics 
prefer his broad and vivid treatment of the boils in his picture 
of 'Job scraping himself (the potsherd exquisitely rendered), 
exhibited at the Academy last year, and purchased by the 
Dowager Lady G-rillo of Pytchley. He dresses in a sort of 
clerico-German style, cuts his hair very short, sighs continu- 
ally, and wears spectacles. No Mondays, Tuesdays, or Wed- 
nesdays, are there in his calendar. The days of the week are 
all Feasts of St. Somebody, or Eves of something, with him. 
When he makes out his washing-bill, his laundress is puzzled 
to make out what ' shyrtes ' and c stockynges ' mean, for so he 
writeth them down ; and when he wanted to let his second 
floor, not one of the passers-by could for the life of them 
understand the wondrous placard he put forth in his parlour- 
window, the same being an illuminated scroll, telling in red, 
blue, and gold hieroglyphics of something dimly resembling 
this : 

EVENISHED CHAMBERES MAIE ON YE UPPER FLOOR BEE HADBE. 

Pipes are in great request in the smoking-room of the 
artists' public — fancy pipes of elaborate workmanship and ex- 
traordinary degrees of blackness. The value of a pipe seems 
to increase as its cleanliness diminishes. Little stumpy pipes, 
the original cost of which was one halfpenny, become, after 
they have been effectually fouled and smoke-blackened, pearls 
beyond price— few content themselves with a simple yard of 
clay— something more picturesque— more moyen age. Chrome, 
who paints ' still life ' nicely, fruit and flowers, and so on, (his 
detractors say apples, oranges, and bills of the play,) smokes 
a prodigious meerschaum, warranted to be from the Danube, 
crammed with Hungarian tobacco, and formerly the property 
of the Y\ r aywode of Widdin. Scumble (good in old houses 
and churches) inhales the fumes cf a big pipe with a porcelain 
bowl, purchased in the Dom-Platz of Aix-la-Chapelle, and 
having Saladin and all his paladins depicted thereon. The 
black cutty, patronised by Bristley (son of Sir Hogg Bristley, 
K.A.) r has been his constant companion in the adventurous 
sketching journeys he has undertaken- — was with him when 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 83 

under sentence of fusillation for sketching a droschky in the 
Nevski Perspective at Petersburgh ; when lion-hunting in 
Caffreland ; nay, it is suspected, even lay quiescent in his 
pocket when hunted as a lion here, on his return. 

In the further corner, sits, as perpetual vice-chairman, the 
famous Xobbs. Xobbs was gold medallist and travelling 
student of the Eoyal Academy in the year Thirty-four. He 
has been a blockhead ever since. He has never painted a 
picture worth looking at ; nor, I seriously believe, were yon 
to lock him in a room with a pencil and a piece of paper, 
could he draw a pint pot from recollection. Yet hath he 
covered roods, perches, acres of tinted paper, with studies 
from the antique and the life ; set him before a statue, with 
drawing-board, crayons, compasses, and plumb-line complete, 
and he will give you every hair of Moses's beard, every muscle 
of the Discobolus ; give him a Eaphael or a Titian to copy, 
and he will produce a duplicate so exact that you would be 
puzzled to tell the ancient from the modern. 

Storyteller in ordinary, historiographer, and undisputed 
nautical authority, is Jack Bute, who is supposed, once upon 
a time, to have painted Lord Xelson's portrait, and who, on 
strength of that one achievement, has been a famous man ever 
since, Who would not be proud of standing fourpenn'orth to 
Jack Bute ? Jack has been a sailor, too, a gallant sailor. ' I 
was at Algiers, sir,' he says, * and fit there ' — he always says 
fit, ' I was among the boarders, and the only difficulty I had 
was in shaking the Algerine blackguards off my boarding- 
pike, I spitted so many of them,' Sometimes an over-sense of 
his dignity, and an over-dose of gin and water, make Jack 
quarrelsome and disagreeable ; sometimes he is maudlin, and 
can only ejaculate ' Xelson ' — ' Fourpenn'orth ' — amid floods 
of tears. 

The artists' ' public ' is generally hard-by a ' life school,' or 
institution where adult artists meet nocturnally to study the 
human figure, animals &c, from the life. One of the standing- 
patterns or text-books of the school is quietly standing in front 
of the house now, in the shape of a symmetrically-shaped 
donkey, which Bill Jones, its master, the costermonger, is 
very happy (for a consideration) to lend to the life school to 
be ' drawed ' at night, after the patient animal has been draw- 
ing all day. Another pattern is refreshing himself with mild 
porter at the bar, being no other, indeed, than the well-known 
Caravaggio Potts, Artiste -modele, as he styles himself. He began 

g 2 



84 ' GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Life as Jupiter Tonans, subsequently passed through the Twelve 
Apostles, and is now considered to be the best Belisarius in the 
model world. His wife was the original Venus Callipyge, of 
Tonks, E.A., but fluctuates at present between Voluinnia and 
Mrs. Primrose. 

The landlord of the artists' inn knows all about the exhibi- 
tions, what days they open, and what days they shut — who 
ought to have been hung * on the line,' who the prize-holders 
in the Art Union are, and what pictures they are likely to 
select for their prizes. Were you to enter the sitting-room, 
you would be astonished at the number of portraits, full- 
length, half-length, three-quarter-length, in oil, water-colour, 
and crayons, of himself, his wife, children, and relations gene- 
rally, which adorn that apartment. Has the blushing canvas 
blotted out the sins of the slate ? 

Between art and literature there is a very strong band of 
union (becoming stronger every day, I trust), and I would 
step at once from the artists' tavern to the literary tavern, 
were I not enabled to save time and our chariot steeds by re- 
maining awhile in Camden Town, where two or three varie- 
ties of Public life yet remain to be noticed ; for, in this lo- 
cality uplifts its lofty head ' The Eailway Tavern ;' here, also, 
is the ' house ' frequented by veterinary surgeons ; here, the 
hostelry affected by medical students. A brief word we must 
have with each of them. 

Hope — wild, delusive, yet comfortable hope — baked the 
bricks and hardened the mortar of which the Eailway Tavern 
was built. Its contiguity to a railway station appeared to its 
sanguine projector a sufficient guarantee for immense success. 
He found out what the fallacies of hope were, before he had 
done building. He hanged himself. To him enters an enter- 
prising licensed victualler, formerly of the New Cut, who ob- 
tained a transient meed of success by an announcement of the 
sale within of ' Imperial black stuff, very nobby.' Every- 
body was anxious to taste the ' Imperial black stuff,' and for 
some days the Eailway Tavern was thronged ; but the public 
found out that the mixture was not only very nobby, but very 
nasty, and declined a renewal of the draught. The next pro- 
prietor was a fast gentleman , which may account for his having 
gone so very fast into ' The Gazette ;' although he always attri- 
buted his ruin to his having had a great many pewter pots 
stolen, which he subsequently unwittingly received again in 
the guise of bad half-crowns. For years the Eailway Tavern 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 85 

stood, big, white, deserted-looking, customerless ; but a new 
neighbourhood gradually arose round the station ; front streets 
gradually generated back streets ; back streets begot courts 
and alleys. There is a decent assemblage of customers, now, 
at the bar ; a fair coffee-room connection, and a very numerous 
parlour company, composed of guards and engine-drivers ; 
strongly perfumed with lamp-oil, who call the locomotives 
'she,' the company 'they,' and each other -mate.' Though 
it has been built some years, the Kailway Tavern has yet an 
appearance of newness. The paint seems wet, the seats un- 
worn, and the pots unbattered. The doors have not that com- 
fortable, paint-worn manginess about the handle common to 
public-house portals in frequented neighbourhoods. The 
Bail way Tavern always reminds me of the one hotel in a 
small Irish town — that square, white, many-windowed, un- 
comfortable-looking edifice, frowning at the humble, ram- 
shackle little chapel, awing the pigs and embellishing the 
landscape ; but seldom troubled with custom or customers. 

Out of the way, lumbering drink-dray of ours, and let this 
smart gig, with the fast-trotting mare braced up very tight in 
the shafts thereof, rattle by ! In the vehicle sits a gentleman 
with a very shiny hat, a very long shawl, and an indefinite 
quantity of thick great-coats, from the pocket of one of which 
peep a brace of birds. The gig is his ' trap,' and the fast- 
trotting mare is his mare Fanny, and he himself is Mr. Sand- 
cracks, of the firm of Sandcracks and TVindgall, veterinary 
surgeons. He is going to refresh Fanny with some meal and 
water, and himself with some brandy and ditto, at the Horse 
and Hocks, a house especially favoured and frequented by 
veterinary surgeons, and the walls of whose parlour (the H. 
and H.) are decorated with portraits of the winners of ever so 
manyDerbys, and some curious anatomical drawings of horses. 
The frequenters of the H. and H. are themselves curious com- 
pounds of the sporting character and the surgeon. You will 
find in the bar, or behind it (for they are not particular), or 
in the parlour, several gentlemen, with hats as shiny, shawls 
as long, and coats as multifarious, as Mr. Sandcracks', discours- 
ing volubly, but in a somewhat confusing manner, of dogs, 
horses, spavins, catch-weights ; the tibia and the fibula, handi- 
caps, glanders, the state of the odds, and comparative anatomy. 
They will bet on a horse and bleed him with equal pleasure — 
back him, dissect him, do almost everything with him that can 
be done with a horse. They must work hard and earn money ; 



86 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

yet to my mind they always seem to be driving the fast-trot- 
ting mare in the smart gig to or from the Horse and Hocks. 

Medical men don't enter into my category of ' public ' users. 
They have their red port wine at home. The Medical students' 
public is never known by its sign. It may be the Grapes, or 
the Fox, or the Magpie and Stump, but it is always distin- 
guished among the students as Mother So-and-so's, or Old 
What-d'ye-call-him's. The students generally manage to drive 
all other customers away. Nor chair, nor benches — nay, nor 
settles, are required for the students' parlour. They prefer 
sitting on the tables ; nor do they want glasses — they prefer 
pint pots ; consuming even gin and water from those bright 
flagons : nor do they need spittoons, nor pictures on the walls, 
nor bagatelle-boards. 

If I wonder how the veterinary surgeon finds time to prac- 
tise, how much greater must be my dubiety as to how the 
medical students find time to study! The pipe, the pot of 
half and half, the half-price to the theatre, the Cider-cellars to 
follow, and the knocker-twisting gymnastics to follow that 
(with, sometimes, the station-house by way of rider), appear to 
fill up their whole time — to leave not a point unoccupied upon 
the circle of their daily lives. Yet, work they must, and work 
they do. The smoking, drinking, fighting life, is but an ordeal 
— somewhat fiery, it is true — from which have come unscathed 
Doctor Bobus, rolling by in his fat chariot ; Mr. Slasher, ready 
to cut off all and each of my limbs, in the cause of science, at 
St. Spry's Hospital ; but, from which have crawled, singed, 
maimed, blackened, half-consumed, poor Jack Fleam (he sang 
a good song did Jack, and was a widow's son), now fain to be 
a new policeman ; and Coltsfoot, the clinical clerk at Bar- 
tholomew's, who died of delirium tremens on his passage to 
Sydney. 

On again we roll, and this time we leave the broad suburban 
roads, furzed with trim cottages and gardens — white cottage 
bonnets with green ribbons — for crowded streets again. If 
you want to back Sally for the Chester Cup, or Hippopotamus 
for the double event, or to get any information on any sporting 
subject, where can you get it better, fresher, more authentic, 
than in one of the sporting-houses, of which I dare say I am 
not very far out if I say there are a hundred in London ? Not 
houses where sporting is casually spoken of, but where it is 
the staple subject of conversation, business, and pleasure to 
the whole of the establishment, from the landlord to the potboy. 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 87 

Let us take one sporting-house as a type. Dozens of pictures 
- — Derby winners, Dog Billys, the Go dolphin Arabian ; Snaffle, 
the jockey; Mr. Tibbs, the trainer (presented to him by a 
numerous circle of,. &c, &c). Nailed against the wall are a 
horse-shoe, worn by Eclipse, and a plate formerly appertain- 
ing to Little Wonder. In a glass-case behind the bar is a 
stuffed dog — Griper ; indeed, the famous bull-dog formerly the 
property of that enthusiastic sporting character, Jack Myrtle, 
who having had rather too decided a settling day with one 
Mr. Ware, was done to death at Aylesbury : the body of Mr. Ware 
having been found in a pond, and twelve ignorant jurymen 
having concurred in a verdict that the bold Jack Myrtle put 
him there. The landlord of the sporting-house is a sporting 
character you may believe me. Such a chronological memory 
he has of all the horses that have won races, for goodness 
knows how many years ! Such bets he makes touching these 
same chronological questions! — such crowns, half-crowns, and 
6 glasses round ' he wins ! When he has been lucky on an 
' event,' he stands unlimited champagne. He had a Derby 
Sweep, and a St. Leger Sweep, and a Great Northamptonshire 
Sweep, and a great many other sweeps, or ticket lotteries, at 
his house ; of which sweeps I only know that I never drew 
the highest horse in any of them, and never knew the sporting 
character who did. 

Horses are A. 1, of course, at the sporting public, but dogs 
are not despised. The Screwtail Club have a ' show ' meeting 
every Friday night, followed by an harmonic meeting. At 
the ' show, 5 comparisons take place, and the several qualifica- 
tions are discussed of spaniels, terriers, greyhounds, and almost 
every other kind of canine quadruped. Dark- whiskered men 
in velveteen shooting-coats, loom mysteriously about the bar 
on show nights. In their pockets they have dogs ; to them 
enter ' parties,' or agents of ' parties ' who have lost the said 
4 dogs ' — flagons of beer, and noggins of Geneva without 
number, are discussed to bind bargains, or ' wet ' bargains, or 
as portions of the ' regulars,' to which the agents or their 
assigns are entitled. 

Who comes to the sporting public-house ? Who drinks in 
its bar and parlour ? Who puffs in its smoking-room ? — who, 
but the sallow-faced little man, with the keen black eye and 
the bow-legs — swathed in thick shawls and coats — who, every 
Derby-day, bursts on your admiring gaze, all pink silk, snowy 
buck-skins, and mirror-like tops, as a jockey ? Who but 



88 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

' Nemo,' who "offers you an undeniable 'tip,' and ' Mendax,' 
with his never-failing ' pick ?' who come incog n indeed, but 
still come to see without being seen ? "Who, but that fool of 
all fools — that dupe of all dupes — that gull of all gulls — the 
sporting fool, the sporting dupe, the sporting gent ! lie (brain- 
less youth) who has ' good information 5 about Hawkey e, who 
' lays out his money ' upon Buster ; who backs Pigeon for the 
' double event ;' who ' stands to win ' by every horse, and loses 
by them all ; who is so stupendously knowing, and is so 
stupidly and grievously plucked by the most transparent 
sharpers upon earth ! 

London, the great city of refuge for exiles of all nations, the 
home or place of sojourn for foreign ambassadors, foreign mer- 
chants, foreign singers, cooks, artists, watchmakers, sugar- 
bakers, organ-grinders, and hair-dressers, has necessarily also 
its public-houses, favoured by the more especial and peculiar 
patronage of foreigners temporarily or permanently resident 
in the metropolis. The foreigner can take his glass, and imbibe 
his ' grogs ' with as much pleasure as the true Briton ; although, 
perhaps, with somewhat more moderation, and less table- 
thumping, glass-replenishing, waiter-bnllying, and subsequent 
uneven and uncertain locomotion. It is a great mistake to 
imagine that foreigners cannot appreciate and. do not occasion- 
ally indulge in conviviality ; only they generally content 
themselves with the ' cheering ' portion of the cup, eschewing 
its ' inebriating ' part. 

Let us essay a pull at the beer-engine of one of the foreign 
hostelries of London — the refugees' house of calk Herr Brutus 
Eselskopf, the landlord, is a refugee himself, a patriot without 
a blot on his political scutcheon. He has been a general of 
brigade in his time ; but he has donned the Boniface apron, 
and affiliated himself to the Boniface guild, and dispenses his 
liquors with as much unconcern as if he had never worn 
epaulettes and a cocked hat, and had never seen real troops 
with real bands and banners defile before him. "Where shall 
his house be ? In the purlieus of Oxford Street, near Leicester 
Square, or in the centre of that maze of crooked, refugee- 
haunted little streets between Saint Martin's Lane and Saint 
Anne's Church, Soho ? Go for Soho ! Go for a mean, unpre- 
tending-looking little house of entertainment at the corner of 
a street, a Tadmor in the wilderness, set up by Herr Brutus 
Eselskopf for the behoof of his brothers in exile. 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC 5 LIFE. 89 

Xo very marked difference can at first be discerned, as 
regards fittings up and appurtenances, between the refugees' and 
any other public-house. There is a bar and a barmaid, there 
is a beer-engine and there are beer-drinkers ; and were it not 
that the landlord wears a Turkish cap, with blue tassels, and 
a beard and moustachios of prodigious magnitude, all of which 
are rather out of the common or Britannic order of things, you 
might fancy yourself at an English public-house. But five 
minutes' sojourn therein, and five minutes' observation of the 
customers, will soon convince you to the contrary. Herr 
Eselskopf's little back parlour is filled, morning, noon, and 
night, with foreigners under political clouds of various degrees 
of density, and in a cloud of uniform thickness and of strong 
tobacco, emitted in many-shaped fumes from pipes of eccentric 
design. By the fire, reading the ' Allgemeine Zeitung ' or 
c Ost-Deutsche Post,' and occasionally indulging in muttered 
invectives against the crowned heads of Europe, generally, 
and the Emperor of Austria in particular, is that valiant re- 
publican Spartacus Bursch, erst P.H.D. of the University of 
Heidelberg, then on no pay, but with brevet rank, behind a 
barricade formed of an omnibus, two water-carts and six pav- 
ing-stones at Frankfort ; subsequently and afterwards of the 
Charite Hospital at Berlin, possessor of a broken leg ; after- 
wards of the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, condemned; [to im- 
prisonment for life ; afterwards of Paris, France, Bed 
Bepublican, manufacturer of lucifer-matches, affilie of several 
secret societies, chemical lecturer, contractor for paving roads, 
usher in a boarding-school ; then of Oran, Algeria, private 
soldier in the Foreign Legion ; then of Burgos, Santander, St. 
Sebastian, and Passajes, warrior in the Spanish service, Carlist 
or Christino by turns ; then of Montevideo ; then of the United 
States of America, professor in the colleges of Gouveville, Va., 
and Ginslingopolis, Ga. ; barman at a liquor store, professor 
of languages, and marker at a IS ew Orleans billiard-room ; 
subsequently and ultimately of London, promoter of a patent 
for extracting vinegar from white lead, keeper of a cigar-shop, 
professor of fencing, calisthenics, and German literature : and 
latterly out of any trade or occupation. 

There is likewise to be found here, the Polish colonel with 
one arm, Count Schottischyrinkski playing draughts with 
Professor Toddiegraff. lately escaped from Magdeburg ; Cap- 
tain Scartaffaccio, who has fought bravely under Charles 
Albert, at IS ovara, and for the Danes in Schleswig Holstein, 



90 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and against the French on the battlements of Eome, and under 
Manin, at Venice, against the xiustrians ; also there may be 
encountered sundry refugees of the vielle souche — the old style, 
in fact — men who can remember the Grand Duke Constan- 
tine, the knout, nose-slitting, and Siberia ; who have been 
St. Simonians, and Carbonaros, and Setembrists ; who can 
tell you grim stories of the piombi of Venice, of Prussian 
citadels, and Italian galleys, of the French cellular vans, and 
the oubliettes of Spielberg. But the last few years, and the 
almost European revolt that followed the Kevolution of 1848, 
has brought to England a new class of refugees, somewhat 
looked down *on, it must be said, by the old hands, the matri- 
culated in barricades, and those who have gone in for honours 
in street combats, but still welcomed by them as brothers in 
adversity. These are enthusiastic young advocates, zealous 
young sons of good families, patriotic officers, who have 
thrown up their commissions under despot standards to fight 
for liberty, freedom-loving literary men, republican jour- 
nalists, Socialist workmen. These poor fellows have been 
hunted from frontier to frontier on the Continent, like mad 
dogs. Half of them have been condemned to death in their 
own country, many of them forced to fly from home, and 
kindred, and friends, and occupation, for deeds or thoughts 
expressed in print or writing, which ministers or govern- 
ments would take, here, more as compliments than otherwise. 
They manage things differently abroad ; and so there are in 
London many public-houses and coffee-shops always full of 
refugees. Harmless enough they are, these unfortunate 
forestieri. There are black sheep among them, certainly ; but 
St. Wapshot's sainted fold itself has, sometimes, muttons of 
suspicious hue amongst its snowy fleeces. There are refu- 
gees who cheat a little sometimes at billiards, and who rob 
their furnished lodgings, and attempt to pass bad half-crowns, 
and forge Prussian bank-notes (I never could find out how 
they could pay for forging, for their value appears to vary 
between twopence-halfpenny and sixpence). There are 
refugees who get up sham testimonials, and are connected 
with swindling companies and gambling cigar-shops ; but 
consider how many thousands of them here in London, born 
and bred gentlemen, w T ho have lost everything in the main- 
tenance of what they conscientiously believed to be the right 
against might, live quietly, honestly, inoffensively, doing no 
harm, existing on infinitesimal means, working hard for 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC ' LIFE. 91 

miserable remuneration, willing to do anything for a crust, 
teaching languages for sixpence a lesson, painting portraits 
for a shilling a-piece, taking out lessons on the flute or piano- 
forte in bread or meat ! We give them foot-room, to be sure, 
but little more ; and stout John Bull, with all his antipathy 
to foreigners, may sometimes melt set the sight of a burly 
Polish major of heavy dragoons, explaining the intricacies of 
an Italian verb to the young ladies in a boarding-school, or a 
Professor of moral philosophy selling cigars on commission 
for his livelihood. They live, somehow, these poor foreigners, 
much as the young ravens do, I opine ; yet they meet some- 
times at Herr Eselskopf's, in Soho, or at some French or 
Polish or Italian public-house in the same refugee neighbour- 
hood, and take their social glass, drinking to better times, 
when they shall enjoy their own again. Meanwhile, they 
accommodate themselves, as best they may, to the manners 
and customs of their step-fatherland, forgetting Ehine wines 
and Bavarian beer, and such foreign beverages for the 
nonce, and living humbly, industriously, contentedly, good- 
humouredly, on such poor meats and drinks as they can get. 

I call these refugees (and they form the great majority of 
the exiles in London) the quiescent ones ; but there are also 
the incandescent ones, the roaring, raging, rampaging, red- 
hot refugees ; the amateurs in vitriol, soda-water bottles full 
of gunpowder, and broken bottles for horses' hoofs ; the 
throwers of grand pianofortes from first-floor windows on 
soldiers' heads, the cutters off of dragoons' feet, the impalers 
of artillerymen. There are some of these men in London. 
"Where do they meet? Kot at Herr Eselskopfs, certainly. 
They did frequent his establishment ; but since Hector 
Chalamot, ex-silkweaver from Lyons, attempted to bite off 
the nose of Captain Sprottleowski, on the question of assas- 
sinating the King of Prussia : which little rixe was followed 
by Teufelshand, delegate of the United Society of Brother 
Butchers, demanding the heads of the company: and by 
little Doctor Pferdschaff insisting on singing his ' Tod-lied,'' or 
Hymn to the Guillotine, to the tune of the Hundredth Psalm, 
—since these events, good Herr Eselskopf would have none 
of them. They met after that at a little gasthaus in White- 
chapel, formerly known as the ' SchinkenundbrodJ or German 
sandwich house ; but Strauss, the landlord, in compliment to 
the severe political principles of his guests, re-christened it 
under the title of the ' Tyrants' Entrails.' Liberty, equality, 



92 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and fraternity were here the order of the day, until Doininico 
Schiavonne was stabbed by an Italian seaman from the docks, 
because he was a Eoman; the assassin being subsequently 
knived himself by another seaman, because he was a Tuscan. 
Well, well ! Can ever a pot boil without some scum at the 
top ? There is bellow and black smoke as well as a bullet to 
every blunderbuss. 



VIII. 

PHASES OF ' PUBLIC ' LIFE* 
CHAPTER III. 



Should the readers of these pages have formed or expressed 
any opinion on the subject of Barclay's Dray, formerly herein 
adverted to, I should not wonder if they opined that the 
wheels of that vehicle stood grievously in need of lubricating ; 
inasmuch as the spokes and axles thereof have ceased revolv- 
ing for some time ; a dead lock being thereby created, and a 
crowded literary thoroughfare blocked up. Weighty and 
sufficient reasons are not wanting to be alleged in excuse for 
this temporary stoppage. The writer could, if he chose, 
plead as many pleas as the defendant in an action at law — 
from ' never indebted,' to ' leave and license ;' yet he is of 
opinion that it would be far more graceful and respectful in 
him to follow the example of that Mayor of Boulogne, who, 
of the four-and-twenty sufficient reasons he had provided to 
account for the non-firing of a salute to Henry the Eighth, 
put forward as the first reason, that he had no gunpowder. 
So I may say, humbly," that the third chapter of this essay 
was not sooner printed, because it was not written ; — a tho- 
roughly logical and conclusive reason, reminding me of the 
Spanish fleet, which could not be seen, because it was not in 
sight ; or, to come nearer home, of some worthy men — Con- 
servatives, ratepayers, vestrymen, and other residents of a 
country town I know, who petitioned lately against the 
introduction of gas- lamps into the streets ; for which they 
alleged as a reason — not that gas was atheistical, or papistical, 
or subversive of Church and State — but solely that, as they 
expressed it with beautiful simplicity, ' they didn't want no 
gas.' 

The world has grown older, and the Eegistrar-General has 
written a good many columns in the ' Times ' since we sat in 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 93 

the dray together among the beer-barrels. The May sun was 
shining 1 and the birds were singing, when I sat down to write 
chapter the first ; but now, as I bend over chapter the third, 
the trees are strewing dead leaves on the grave of summer, 
and the October blast moans lamentably through the branches 
as though it were a dog, howling by night before a house for 
the year that is to die. 

The public life of Israel ; Judaical conviviality ; that shall 
be my theme. The publics used by the peculiar people are 
marked with distinctive characteristics, like everything else 
appertaining to that curious race. When Holywell Street 
was more old clothesy than literary ; and, when children of 
the Tribes lay T in wait at the shop-doors behind cloaks and 
paletots, like wild beasts in ambush, frousy little public- 
houses nestled among the old clothes shops pretty numerously. 
They were not cheerful nor gaily-decorated establishments. 
Mostly with semicircular counters, mostly without forms or 
settles (for it is a peculiarity of the ' persuasion ' to take its 
refreshment almost invariably standing) : they smelt into- 
lerably of stale tobacco-smoke — that of bad cigars which the 
landlord and his customers continually smoked. No pipes 
were ever seen and no cigar-cases or cigar-boxes were ever 
produced. All smoked cigars, yet no man ever seemed to light 
a fresh ' weed,' but kept on, from morn to dewy eve, con- 
tinuously puffing at the same stump or fag-end of rolled 
tobacco or cabbage, or lettuce-leaf, as the case might be. 
They appeared to possess some magical property of indefinite 
prolongation. 

The ' Jews' Harp ' stood somewhere between Old Castle 
Street, Holywell Street, and Lyons Inn. There was an old 
clothes shop, wholesale, retail, and for exportation, on either 
side. Early in the morning, winter and summer, the gentle- 
men clothesmen of the vicinity called in for a cigar before 
they started on their habiliment-collecting rounds. Liquor 
they never consumed before business, and they even went 
trust (till the afternoon) for the cigar : it being a maxim 
among the people never to part with money, where disburse- 
ment could by any means be avoided, before some bargains 
had been made, and some profit, however small, secured. 
Towards twelve o'clock the clothesmen would return with 
heavily-laden bags ; and then the space before the bar became 
so crowded with Jews and their sacks that it resembled a 
granary of old clothes ; then was the foaming pot quaffed, and 



94 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

the fried flounder eaten ; then were racy anecdotes told of 
keen bargains and unwary customers, and clothes-vendors 
who ' didn't know the value of things, no more than a child, 
my dear.' Towards evening the bar would be crowded 
again, but always with Jews. They betted on every ima- 
ginable topic — horses, dogs, the various lengths of cigars, 
theatricals, politics, — anything, in short, on which a variety 
of opinion could possibly exist, and could consequently offer 
a field for a wager. And then they played — these jovial 
Jews — at cribbage, at all-fours, at any game at which six- 
pences could be won or lost. The card-tables were the top 
of the counter, the crown of a hat, the knees of the players, 
a pair of bellows, or any other object offering a plane surface. 
The card-playing at the ' Jews' Harp ' grew to such a pitch, 
that at last Moss lost his licence. He goes under the name of 
Montmorency now; has a Brougham, and handsome cham- 
bers in Waterloo Place ; and, I am given to understand, does 
little bills for the Guards, horse and foot. 

If you would see a genuine Jewish public (since Holywell 
Street has been un-Israelitised), our dray must rumble us 
through the narrow straggling City streets via Aldgate Pump 
to the heart of Jewish London. We could have taken St. 
Mary Axe as a nearer approach to it ; but Be vis Marks, Mitre 
Street, Duke's Place, (Jree Church Lane, St. Anne's Square, 
half a dozen choked-up little streets running into the broad 
channel of Houndsditch, are more redolent of Jewish life. 
The sign of the people is everywhere. The air is heavy with 
the fumes of Minories-made cigars. Old — very old — Old 
Jewry is pufSng lazily from open windows, or lounging on 
door steps, or chatting at street corners — apparently idle, but, 
trust me, doing keen strokes of business. It is Sunday morn- 
ing, and the New Police Act notwithstanding, I can find half 
a dozen publics, not wide open, but still in the full swing of 
business. Sunday not being the Sabbath tof the peculiar 
people, they have, of course, none of the scruples connected 
with working on that day that we have ; so the Nemesis of 
the blue uniform, the lettered collar, and the glazed hat 
slumbers in Jewry on Sunday morning ; won't see that beer 
is sold, won't remember that Church service is proceeding, 
won't hear the gurgling of beer-engines, or the murmurs of 
spirit-taps. Our Judaical public-house lies in Aminadab 
Street, close to Talmud Square, and hard by the Marks. It 
used to be known as Duke's Place. On one side resides Mr. 



PHASES OF -PUBLIC 5 LIFE. 95 

Reuben Sheeny, dealer in old gold and silver, who disr.l 
nothing more valuable in his shop window than a wooden 
bowl with two anchor buttons, within a ragged, tarnished 
epaulette ; but who. I dare say. has the wealth of the Indies 
inside, somewhere. On the other side is a little squeezed-np 
sandwich of a shop ; which, at first sight. I mistook for a stall 
for the repair of Hebrew soles and upper leather ; imagining 
that the Hebrew inscription over the window and on the door- 
jambs related to the mysteries of the crispinical art. But I 
have since found out my error. The grave old man with 
goggle-eyed spectacles and a flowing white beard is not a 
cobbler. He is a scribe, a public letter-writer, an . 

;. He will write love-letters, draw contracts and agree- 
ments, make severe" applications for little bills, and conduct 
the general correspondence of Jewry. Unchanging Jewry ! 
Here, among the docks and screaming factories, to find a 
scribe. "Writing, perhaps, with a reed pen. and possessing 
very probably the rolls of the law in his comer cupboard. 
Between these two tenements is the Bag o' Piags. The 
shutters are up. and the front door is closed ; but. by the side 
door, free ingress and egress are afforded. Not less than fifty 
persons are in the narrow parlour and scanty bar. and your 
humble servant the only Xazarene. Behind the counter is 
Miss Leah, a damsel of distracting beauty, but arrayed for the 
moment in a gown of cotton print. Probably 3Iiss Cosher 
adheres to the principle that beauty, when unadorned, is 
adorned the most, although yesterday, had you seen her 
walking to Synagogue, you would have seen the rainbow- 
tinted produce of the Chinese insect on her ; fair bodye :'" the 
chef-cTceuvre of the looms of India on her symmetrical shoulders; 
the sparkling treasures of the mines of Golconda and of the 
Brazils on her neck and fingers ; and with surely ; enough 
gav gold about her waist' in the way of watches, Trichinopoly 
chains, chatelaines and waist-buckles, to purchase that landed 
estate in the county of Northumberland alluded to by the 
prond young porter of Lord Viscount Bateman. Old Cosher 
sits smilingly by his blooming daughter, smoking ; old Mrs. 
Cosher (very fat, and with a quintuple chin), is frying fish 
in a remarkably strong-smelling oil in the snuggery behind 
the bar, and Master Babshekah Cosher, aged eight, is officia- 
ting as waiter, and pocketing the perquisites or royalties 
attached to his office with amazing rapidity, and with a con- 
fidence beyond his years. On the muddy pewter counter sits 



96 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

a huge tom-cat — a cat of grave and imposing mien, a feline 
Lord Chancellor — sitting, solemnly blinking from out of his 
robes of three-piled fur. 

I may say of the customers of this hostelry, of the neigh- 
bouring public ' The Three Hats/ and of 'The Sheenies Arms ' 
round the corner, that the chief object of their Sunday morn- 
ing's sojourn is the buying or selling of some articles of 
merchandise. From old Simon Eybeck of Bremen, who from 
his dress and piteous look you would not take to be worth 
twopence-halfpenny, but who from the depths of his greasy 
overcoat produces dazzling bracelets, and rings of price and 
necklaces such as a princess might covet, and as you, my dear 
sir, would like to present to your bride that is to be ; from 
Mr. Levi, who wants to dispose of a brocaded petticoat 
formerly in the wardrobe of Queen Anne ; from Mr. Belasco, 
who has some humming-birds, unstuffed, to sell ; and brings 
them out by handsful, till the table is covered with iris- 
tinted feathers ; from these down to Jewish lads and strip- 
lings, willing to swop, buy, sell, or speculate on anything in 
a small way — bargaining is the rule, quiet consumption of 
grog or beer with no reservation the exception. Old Mr. 
Eybeck has just brought out of his waistcoat pocket (after 
much fumbling and diving, and bringing up rusty keys and 
bladeless penknives) a dirty screw of paper which you would 
take, haply, to contain a pennyworth of tobacco, but which, 
unscrewing, Mr. Eybeck shows to contain loose diamonds — 
four or five hundred pounds' worth perhaps. From dirty 
hands to dirty hands are passed about massive golden chains 
and weighty arguments ; and in some of the greasy, frayed, 
battered pocket-books, which are from time to time produced, 
lurk several of those autographs of Mr. Matthew Marshall, the 
sight of which is so good for sore eyes. 

One parting glance we give at these strange Sunday 
customers — these olive faces and glistening eyes, and moist, 
red, pulpy lips. Look around, ere you leave, at an engraving 
on the parlour wall, of the New Synagogue and the Jews' 
Asylum; at the passover cakes over the mantel-piece, kept 
there from year's end to year's end ; and, finally, into the 
dim snuggery in which Mrs. Cosher fried the fish. It is very 
dark and very narrow ; but there is a rich Turkey carpet and 
handsome furniture, and a great cupboard, making a brave 
show of plate and linen. Among the dinner-party damask 
you would find, I dare say, a significant garment — Mr. Cosher's 



PHASES OF ' PUBLIC ' LIFE. 97 

shroud, which lie wears over his clothes, and walks about 
City streets in on the day of the ' YVhite Fast.' 

A sporting public-house. Have you any curiosity, gentle 
reader and student of beer in its varieties, to peep at the 
interior of a ' fighting-house ?' You have : then let us stop 
our chariot before the sign below depicted. 

It is evening. The ' mill' between Lurky Snaggs and Dan 
Pepper (the ' Kiddy '), for one hundred pounds a side, is due 
on the proximate morning. The parlour of the fighting-house, 
where the whereabouts of the fight is to be notified, is thronged 
by professional and amateur members of the Fancy. Hard 
talking has rendered these gentlemen's throats rather dry. 
Beer is indignantly repudiated as something too drouthy and 
thin-bodied by these noble sportsmen ; and steaming ' fours ' 
of gin and 4 sixes ' of brandy troop into the room on the 
waiter's tray in succession, as rapid as the flowers from the 
inexhaustible hat of Herr Louis Do bier. The parlour itself is 
a pugnacious-looking apartment, grimed with smoke, the 
paper torn from the walls in bygone scuffles and punchings of 
heads. Belcher, Mendoza, and Molyneux the black, spar 
ominously at the spectator from muddled mezzotinto plates in 
shabby black frames ; while a tarnished gilt frame, on the 
surface of which a thousand flies had given up the ghost, 
surrounds a portrait, in oils, of Mr. Coffin himself, his muscles 
spasmodically developed, murderous highlows on his feet, and 
a gay Belcher handkerchief twisted round his waist ; the 
whole painted by Archy M'Gilp (a clever man, but given to 
drinking). This work of art is flanked by a shadowy, evanes- 
cent engraving of Mr. Figg the gladiator, stripped to box for 
the championship in the reign of Queen Anne. There is a door, 
on the back of which divers accusations of unpaid drams are 
scored in chalk against members of the Prize Bing. There is, 
wheezing before the fire, an elderly bull-dog, blind of one 
eye, and with a face so scratched and scarred, and beaten out 
of shape in former combats, so crafty, savage, and villanous of 
aspect, that were I to see it on human shoulders and in a 
felon's dock, a thought very like ' fifteen years across the 
water for you, my man,' would pass through my mind. The 
parlour tables are dinted by angry pewter pots ; the parlour 
chairs are dislocated by angry men who have used them as 
weapons of offence and defence, or who have exhibited feats 
of dexterity and strength with them ; such as balancing 
them on the tips of their noses — swinging them on their 

H 



98 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

little fingers at arms' length, or holding thern between their 
teeth. The parlour company is numerous and not select. 
In a corner, tossing for half-crowns in a hat with Spanks the 
omnibus-proprietor, is a lord — a live lord, ye knaves ! one of 
the few live lords who yet support the P.B. He is in a rough 
great-coat, every hair of which stands on end like quills upon 
the fretful porcupine, and known in sporting circles, I believe, 
from its resemblance to the outer envelope of a shaggy dog, as 
a ' bow-wow coat.' This is Lord Shortford, Lurky Snaggs's 
'backer. 5 His noble father, the Earl of Absentaroo (whose 
broad lands were recently brought to the judicial hammer in 
the Encumbered Estates Court, in the island of Ireland), is a 
zealous admirer of the ' noble art of self-defence,' even at this 
time of day ; he being on the wrong side of seventy, and very 
paralytic. At his lordship's Villa-Fisterati, near Cufficina, 
Tuscany, his lordship's grooms frequently have a ' set-to ' on 
the lawn for his lordship's amusement : with the gloves on, of 
course ; though, if they happen to fall off after the third or 
fourth round, his lordship is not unappeaseably incensed. 
Next to the lord is a cadaverous, wild-haired man, 'all 
tatter'd and torn.' He is an author, and cultivates literature 
upon small ' goes ' of grog. He has written handbooks to the 
ring, memorabilia of boxers, ana of sporting characters without 
end. He has the chronology of every event in every fight, 
from the days of Figg and Broughton to the last fight, at his 
fingers' ends. His toilet is on his back ; his dressing-case (in 
the shape of a felting comb with all the back teeth knocked 
out) is in his pocket, cheek-by-jowl with his library (a torn 
copy of 'Boxiana') and his writing-desk (a tattered pad), an 
iron pen lashed on to the stump of a tobacco-pipe by a piece 
of twine, and a penny bottle of ink with a paper plug formed 
from a defunct screw of bird's-eye tobacco instead of a cork. 
He is as strong as a bull, but never fights. He is an oracle, 
but is too timid to bet, and too honest to go into the prophetic 
line of business. He is content to write his literary com- 
positions on tap-room tables for the meagre wages doled out 
to him by cheap sporting periodicals, to get drunk at those 
said tables afterwards, and to sleep peaceably beneath their 
Pembroke canopies, when he falls. He has a pretty turn for 
poetry, and will write you an acrostic on any subject from, 
geology to gaiters, for sixpence. He was a compositor once, 
and even works occasionally now, being able to set up in type 
the rounds of a fight, right off, without any manuscript. 



PHASES OF c PUBLIC ' LIFE. 99 

Lord Shortford patronises him. from time to time ; raid he is 
fond of reciting an ode. in the Alcaic measure, composed by 
him in honour of his lordship, in which he (the peer) is 
celebrated as the 'Maecenas of the ring,' and for which 
Maecenas stood two dozen of Champagne. The room is, 
besides, thronged by fighting men, all with close-cropped 
hair, flattened noses, discoloured faces, wide months, short 
within of the natural allowance of teeth ; and all addicted to 
the wearing of coats with big buttons, cloth-boots, and staring- 
shawls. Then, there are young gentlemen in loose and slack 
garments, who were lately flogged at Eton, and are now in 
the Guards — old gentlemen, who have been a considerable 
time on town, and know, I am led to believe, every move 
thereon — seedy gentlemen living on their wits, and, seem- 
ingly, not thriving much on that course of diet. There are 
gentlemen who, from top to toe, are as plainly and clearly 
dupes as though they carried pigeon inscribed in legible 
characters on their hat-bands: and gentlemen in nose, whisker, 
and pervading appearance as unmistakeably hawks. There 
are some meritorious public characters decorated with a pro- 
fusion of chains and rings, who know several Inspectois of 
the Metropolitan Police by sight, are on bowing terms with 
the stipendiary magistrates sitting at the London Police 
Offices, and who, I dare say, were you to ask them, could tell 
you which was- the snuggest corner on Brixton treadmill, and 
the warmest cell in Col'dbath Fields prison. There is the 
landlord, in a decent suit of black and a white neckcloth, 
wdrich costume, superadded to his bonifacial apron and his 
eminently prize-fighting face, would tend to create a confused 
idea in your mind that, after he had been a gladiator, he had 
had a call and had gone into the ministry : but, finding that 
not to agree with him, had taken, eventually, to the public 
line. Finally, there is Lurky Snaggs, himself, the hero of 
to-morrow's fray. Mr. Coffin has had him in training for the 
last two months : and the devoted Snaggs has worn spiked 
shoes, and carried dumb-bells, and taken long country walks 
in heavy great-coats, and eaten semi-raw beef-steaks, all for 
the more effectual bruising, pounding, and mutilating of Dan 
Pepper, the ' Kiddy,' to-morrow morning. He broke away 
from his training a fortnight since, and was found in an 
adverse house solacing himself with a pint of raw rum, which 
abberration caused some terrible fluctuations in the betting- 
market ; but, all things considered, he has been verv docile 

h 2 



100 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and abstemious, and is, as Mr. James Coffin triumphantly 
asseverates, ' in prime condition, with flesh as' firm as my 
thumb.' 

Betting, laughing, smoking, fierce quarrelling, snatches of 
roaring songs are the entertainments at the Bottleholder and 
Sponge. But Lurky Snaggs is off to bed, and we must be off 
with him. Whither shall this much-enduring dray convey 
us now ? Let us go down to Flunkeyland to a Servants' Public. 

No low neighbourhoods for you now — no narrow streets or 
swarming courts. Hie we to Belgravia ; nay, that is too new 
— to Tyburnia : nay, the mortar is scarcely dry there, either. 
Let it be time-honoured Grosvenoria, the solemn, big-wigged, 
hair-powdered region, where the aristocracy of this land 
have loved to dwell time out of mind. Tyburnia and Bel- 
gravia may be very well for your yesterday nobility— your 
mushroom aristocrats — millionnaires, ex-Lord Mayors, and 
low people of that sort ; but for the heavy swells of the 
peerage, those of the blue blood and the strawberry-leaves, 
and who came over with the Conqueror, Grosvenoria is the 
place. There seems to be a natural air of fashion and true 
gentility about it. Yet things do change, and streets will 
decline. The Earl of Craven lived in Drury Lane once ; Sir 
Thomas More resided down Bishopsgate way ; the Duke of 
Monmouth's address was Soho Square ; and, who knows, some 
day or other, perhaps I shall engage a garret in the mighty 
Lower Grosvenor Street itself. 

Out of Crinoline Square runs, parkwise, as all men know, 
Great Toppletoton Street. Where that thoroughfare intersects 
with Tip Street is, as you well know, Wangwidgeon House — 
a big mansion in the rustic style, of brick, with stone dress- 
ings, standing in a court-yard — where dwells that mighty 
prince, the Duke of Pampotter. Next door to him, down Tip 
Street, is the bachelor's mansion of the Honourable Tom Sar- 
danapalus, M.P. Then comes Mrs. Zenobia, the rich Indian 
widow (worth two lacs : husband was in council : eats too 
much mulligatawney : a great tract distributor, and horse- 
whips her maid-servants). Then is the noble mansion, a 
double house, of old Sir Fielding Framboise, of the firm of 
Framboise, Verditter, and Plum, bankers, and a sleeping 
partner in a great brewery. And then, sir, come Topple- 
toton Mews, and down Toppletoton Mews is the Cocked Hat 
and Smalls, used by all the gentlemen servants in the neigh- 
bourhood. 



PHASES OF 'PUBLIC' LIFE. 101 

Checks, the landlord, who was the Bishop of Bosfnrsus's 
butler, and married Mrs. Crimrnins his Grace's housekeeper, 
has a very delicate and difficult task to perform, I can assure 
you, to keep on friendly terms with all his customers — to 
oblige all and offend none. Some of the gentlemen are so 
very particular, so very scrupulous as to precedency and pro- 
fessional etiquette. There's the duke's gentleman, Mr. Lapp. 
"Well, once upon a time, he was not too proud to step round 
and take a glass with. Checks — in his private snuggery, be it 
understood — and even to smoke a pipe with Binns, Mrs. 
Zenobia's butler, and Truepenny, the Honourable Tom Sar- 
danapalus's man, who reads all his master's blue-books, and is 
crushingly erudite on the case of the Ameers of Scinde. But, 
bless you, Mr. Lapp happening to see a groom — a low stock- 
broker's groom — in Checks's parlour, dandling Mrs. Crim- 
rnins' sister's child, there and then cut and repudiated 
Checks and his establishment for ever. He told Mr. Wedge- 
wood, Prince Knoutikowski's groom of the chambers, that he 
' would never enter that man's house again.' Checks, when 
he heard of it, said in great wrath, that ' nobody wanted him 
so for to do,' that he was ' a hupstart ;' and that he, Checks, 
had kicked him many a time, when they both lived at Sir 
John's — where Checks was under-butler, and the duke's gen- 
tleman was a knife-boy. Then, the footmen rebelled, because 
Doctor Philblister's coachman used the coffee-room. Then, 
even the grooms revolted, because a man of stably appear- 
ance, supposed to be an ostler out of place, used the tap-room ; 
and, as he sat, made a hissing noise as though he was rubbing 
down horses. Poor Checks was very nearly out of his mind ; 
at last he bethought him of the expedient of dividing his 
coffee-room into two, by a moveable wooden partition. In 
one of these he put the butlers, and in another the footmen. 
The great men among the former, and the tip-top valets were 
free of his snuggery ; the grooms and coachmen had the tap- 
room; and the common helpers and stable-folk and the 
general public the bar. 

Our dray has brought us from Mr. Checks's establishment 
to the brewery. We may, perhaps, by-and-by, look in upon 
it again, to inspect its home — the head-quarters of every one 
of the Phases of Public life we have already described. 



102 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 



IX. 

POWDER DICK AND HIS TRAIN. 

The Surrey shore of the Thames at London is dotted with 
damp houses of entertainment. The water-side public-house, 
though, perchance, hard by an archiepiscopal residence, and 
over against a legislative palace, is essentially watersidey. 
Mud is before, behind, around, about it : mud that in 
wet weather surges against its basement in pea-soup-like 
gushes, and that in summer cakes into hard parallelograms of 
dirt, which, pulverised by the feet of customers, fly upwards 
in throat-choking dust. The foundations of the water-side 
public-honse are piles of timbers, passably rotten ; timbers 
likewise shore up no inconsiderable portion of its frontage. 
It is a very damp house. The garrets are as dank and oozy 
as cellars, and the cellars are like — what ?— well : mermaids' 
caves. The pewter pots and counters are never bright ; the 
pipe splints light with a fizzy sluggish sputter ; an unwhole- 
some ooze hangs on the wall : the japanned tea-trays are 
covered with a damp rime ; the scanty vegetation in the back- 
garden resembles sea-weed ; the ricketty summer-house is 
like the wreck of a caboose. The landlord wears a low- 
crowned glazed hat, and the pot-boy a checked shirt ; the very 
halfpence he gives you for change are damp, so is the tobacco, 
so are the leaves of last Saturday's ' Shipping and Mercantile 
Gazette.' They don't wash the water-side public-house much, 
but let it fester and ooze and slime away as it lists ; neither 
do they attempt to clear aw^ay the muddy sort of moat sur- 
rounding it ; although, for the convenience of customers 
wishing to preserve clean boots, there is a species of bridge or 
pontoon leading from the road to the public door, formed of 
rotten deck-planks, and stair-rails. One side of the door is 
guarded by a mop as ragged and as tangled as the unkempt 
head of Peter the wild boy ; the other by a damp dog, 
looking as if he had been in the water too long, had not been 
properly dried when he came out, and had so got chapped and 
mangy. 

Bollocks is the landlord of the water-side public-house, the 
Tom Tug's Head. Bollocks was a jolly young waterman 



POWDER DICK AND HIS TBAIN. 103 

once, and used for to ply at Blaekfriars and elsewhere in the 
days when the waters of the Thames were ruffled by oars 
feathered with skill and dexterity ; and not by the paddle- 
wheels of the Citizen and Waterman steamboats. Bollocks 
won Doggett's Coat and Badge twenty years ago. Afterwards, 
when by the introduction of steam-vessels aquatics had 
become more a sport than an avocation, Bollocks won many 
hard-contested matches. He beat Sammon the Newcastle 
coaley, by three lengths, and was subsequently matched to 
row Jibb, the famous sculler, from Execution Dock, for a 
matter of two hundred pounds. On the evening of the pay 
ment of the last deposit (made good at Thwaits's, the Trim 
built Wherry, Fishgaff Stairs) it so fell out that Jibb and 
Bollocks quarrelling as to who fouled whom in some previous 
match, Jibb broke both Bollocks' shins with an oar ; which, 
coupled with his getting exceedingly inebriated, that night 
and sleeping in a six-oared cutter half full of water, brought 
on lameness and rheumatism, broke off the match (Jibb paid 
forfeit), and moved Bollocks to retire into the public line. 
He is a damp mildewed man now, with bow legs and very 
long arms ; to exhibit the symmetry and muscle of which he 
is, seemingly, much addicted— if one may judge from his 
shirt-sleeves being always rolled up to his armpit. 

Bollocks has, behind his bar, the silver cups he has won 
during his aquatic career; his Doggett's Coat and Badge, 
with his portrait wearing ditto ; the silver oar presented to 
him by the Barge Club (Viscount Billingsgate, chairman), the 
mahogany model of his wager-boat, and a neat collection of 
oars and sculls of various shapes and dimensions. Likewise 
the identical cushion on which Her Mellifluous Highness the 
Grand Duchess Dowager of Kartoffelshausen-Stoubenfeldt sat 
when he, Bollocks, had the honour to row her from Vauxhall 
to Whitehall Stairs, during the visit of the Allied Sovereigns 
to England in 1815. Bollocks's parlour is decorated with 
various coloured engravings of crack scullers in crack wager- 
boats, all bearing (the boats, I mean) in their sharp-nosedness, 
slim-shapedness, and eager, straining attitudes, a certain 
curious, inanimate, yet striking resemblance to so many race- 
horses, winning memorable Derbys. There is a screen before 
the fire, on which are pasted sundry pictorial illustrations of 
the songs of Mr. Thomas Dibdin ; notably Jolly Dick the 
lamplighter, in a full curled wig, lighting a large lamp with 
an enormous flambeau, in so jaunty a manner, that his tumbling 



104 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

off his ladder seems an event anything but problematical of 
occurrence. 

When a rowing-match is on the tapis — or, more appro- 
priately, on the water — the parlour of the Tom Tug's Head m 
scarcely large enough to contain the eager crowd of fresh- 
water sportsmen, watermen, bargees, backers, and amateurs in 
aquatics. On these occasions it is by no means unfrequent to 
see the happy class of society, known among the commonalty 
as i swells,' muster strongly within Eollocks's damp walls. 
The alumni of the two great seats of Academic education are 
here in great numbers, their costumes presenting a sumptuary 
medley, in which the fashions of the wild-beast menagerie 
mingle with those of the stable. At present, they come to 
Eollocks's (which is close to Hook's, the great boat-builder) ; 
they drink out of his pots and clap him on the back, and are 
hail-fellows well met with the decayed tapsters and discarded 
serving-men ; the river weeds, and slime, and scum. They 
meet here, not because they like it, but because some of their 
associates who have been two terms longer than they have at 
' Keys,' or ' Maudlin,' sa} r that it is very 4 jolly ' to go to 
old Eollocks's ' crib,' that it is ' life, my boy,' that it is ' the 
thing,' and so on. 

Apart from the parlour of the Tom Tug's Head connected 
with aquatics as a sport, I must enumerate a miscellaneous 
population who are of the water and watery, though they run- 
no races and win no cups. Here by night smoke their pipes 
and drink their grog, captains of river steamboats : silent, 
reserved men, mostly, lost in fogs of fluvial metaphysics, 
perhaps ; or forming mental charts of shoals in the river yet 
undiscovered. These aquatic omnibus-drivers, if I may call 
them so, puzzle and disconcert me mightily. They are 
inscrutably mysterious. Where do they live ? Yv^hat were 
they before the steamboats were started ? Do their wives (if 
they have wives) call themselves Mrs. Captain So and So ? 
Are the call-boys their sons ? Have they studied steam ? 
Could they stoke ? W r ould they be sea-sick if they were to go 
to sea? They are nautical men, yet why do they always wear 
frock coats, round hats, and half-boots ? When shall we see a 
' Citizen ' captain in a cocked hat ? 

Kot so much parlour customers, but chiefly frequenters of 
the bar, or hangers about the door and muddy bridge, are 
knots of damp, silent, deep-drinking men, surrounding whom 
there is a halo of deep and fearful interest. I know what 



POWDER DICK AND HIS TRAIN. 105 

they wear those huge leathern aprons and thigh hoots for. 
I know why they carry at times that weird apparatus of 
hooks and cordage. I know what lies sometimes in the long, 
low. slimy shed at the bottom of the garden, with a padlock 
on the door, blue, swollen, stiff, stark, dead ! These be the 
searchers of the river, the finders of horrors, the coroner's- 
purveyors, the beadle's informants, the marine-storekeeper's 
customers. When a man is no longer a man. but a body, and 
drowned, these seek and find him. The neighbouring brokers' 
stalls and rag-shops have dead men's boots and dead men's 
coats exposed for sale. These men are quiet, civil, sober men 
enough, and passing honest — only there never was a drowned 
man found with any money in his pockets. 

Homogeneous to the bar and purlieus of the Tom Tug's 
Head are casual half-pint-of-23orter customers, mudlarks, 
sewer gropers, rat-catchers, finders, river thieves, steamboat 
touters, waterside beggars, waterside thieves, I am afraid, 
sometimes. They pick up a living, nobody knows how. out 
of the mud and soppy timbers, as men will pick up livings 
from every refuse ; as a teeming population and an advanced, 
civilization only can have such livings to be picked up. 

I don't know whether I am justified — before coming to 
Powder Dick — in describing the house I am about, now. 
lightly to touch upon as a waterside ' public,' inasmuch as it is 
less by the waterside than on the water itself — an hostelry 
permanently floating on the muddy bosom of the Thamesian 
stream. In good sooth this ; public ' hath its habitat on a 
barge : its basement and cellar are keel and ribs. During- 
the week it is moored by the muddy shore ; but on Sundays 
it casts anchor a good score of yards therefrom ; and the pro- 
prietor may. if he list, join in the exulting chorus of the 
piratical navigator whose bark was his bride, who was afloat, 
afloat ! and, being a rover, free. I will call the proprietor 
3Ir. Eover ; for his hair is red, and he has a jovial, roving 
delivery and a roving eye (one), and, according to the 
centilingued Rumour, has roved a great deal in his time — to 
the Antipodes once on compulsion. 3Ir. Rover's bride, the 
Barge and Buttons, has attained a green old age — to judge 
by the rankly aqueous vegetation clinging to her mildewed 
sides. For aught 1 or Mr. Rover know, she may have been 
once, as a single barge or lady, first cousin to. if not herself the 
very identical, Folly on the Thames, at which our great-grand- 
fathers and grandmothers halted sometimes in their wherries 



106 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

on their way to a Vauxhall masquerade. The Barge and 
Buttons may have beheld the ' nice conduct of a clouded 
cane/ the surrounding waters may have rippled reflectively 
with the dazzling brightness of Belinda's diamonds, of the 
still more dazzling brightness of Belinda's eyes. The Barge's 
rotten timbers may have been mute witnesses of the humours 
of Lieutenant Lismahago, of the fopperies of Beau Tibbs, of 
the assurance of Ferdinand Count Fathom, of the fashionable 
airs of Miss Caroline Arabella Wilhelmina Skeggs ; for the 
Folly on the Thames was the resort of highly fashionable 
company, and if bears were danced there they were never 
danced but to the very genteelest of tunes. I only hazard 
this, nothing more. I am not certain. 

Eover is a cunning man. Sunday, the dies non (com- 
paratively speaking) of the publican, of the financier (though 
beer can be sold in church hours and bargains made at church 
doors), is a harvest day for him. On week-days, as I have 
said, his boat is on the shore ; but, hebdomadally, his bark is 
on the sea, or rather on the river ; and, being there, Eover is 
extra-parochial, and can sell all sorts of exciseable commodities. 
So can, and do, as all men know, the river steamboats. All 
sorts of benches of magistrates, parochial and municipal 
authorities, have tried to do all sorts of things with the 
astute landlord; but in vain. The Eover is free and licensed. 
You have, to be sure, to pay a small augmentation of price on 
the liquors you consume, owing to the necessity of taking a 
wherry or a ferry-boat to put you on board the Barge and 
Buttons ; but what is a penny to a man who must and will 
have his drink, week-day or Sunday, fair weather or foul ? 

Touching Sunday, I am moved to advert here, cursorily, to 
a class of bibulous philosophers, who unite the wisdom of the 
serpent to the subtilty of the fox, and who, drunken dogs as 
they mostly are, have been wary and expert enough to baffle 
persons and powers of no meaner note than the Houses of 
Lords and Commons. These are the Sunday ' dram- waiters.' 
The legislature has said to the dram- waiter, ' John Smith, 
during such and such hours, when divine service is per- 
formed, you shall not buy beer of Thomas Swypes.' To the 
publican it has said, ' Swypes, you shall not, during the 
aforesaid hours, sell any beer to John Smith ; and if you do, 
I, the Law, will send my lictors, or " bobbies," after you, and 
I will mulct you of golden pounds and take away your licence, 
and bring you very low, and, in fact, play the devil with you.' 



POWDER DICK AXD HIS TRACT. 107 

But the ' dram-waiter/ wiser, subtler, and warier than even 
the collective wisdom of the nation, forthwith sets to study 
parochial law and parochial regulations. He finds, that in 
one parish, afternoon service begins at one hour, and in 
another at another ; that in the one street in the county of 
Middlesex, called the Strand, there are houses that close from 
two till four, from three till fiye, from three till eight, from 
six to seven, p.m., respectively : that some publics are extra- 
parochial. The ' dram- waiter ' will do without his Sunday- 
morning drink by taking as much home over-night as he 
wants, or he will introduce himself surreptitiously into a 
c public ' with the connivance of a lawless licensed victualler ; 
but he is not to be baulked of his post-prandial potations. He 
knows to a moment when the Bag o' Kails opens, and when 
the Elephant and Shoestrings closes. He can roam from 
bar to bar, suck sweets from every noggin, and keep himself 
all the time within the strict limits of legality. He is never 
hard up for a drink. He may get as drunk as an African 
king between litany and sermon, and endanger no man's 
licence. So much will perverted human ingenuity do. The 
glutton studies Latin to be able to read the beastly messes of 
Apicius in the original. We learn to paint in order to 
blacken, to write in order to libel. Heaven gives ns the 
talents, and — somebody else their application. 

But, revenons a nos Buttons. This barge- tap offers, both on 
week-days and Sundays, many features of social peculiarity 
worthy of entrance into the common-place book of the philo- 
sophic observer. Analogically thinking, I perpend that this 
beery vessel has many points in common with the dark, 
stifling mouldy cheese, and rancid rat, and raw rum-smelling 
store-room of an emigrant-ship, or to the worst class of bar in 
the worst class American steamer. This reeking smell of 
bad spirits, this lowering roof, these sticky stains of beer, 
this malty mildew, these haggard or crimsoned customers — 
these, the accessories more or less of almost every public- 
house, but here denuded of the adventitious concomitants of 
light and glitter and gilding, stand forth in hideous and 
undisguised relief. They mean drink and drunkenness with- 
out excuse or extenuation ; the cup that inebriates and does 
not cheer ; the bowl that is wreathed with no flowers of soul, 
but with the crass dockweeds of intemperance. Bacchus is 
dismounted here, and lies wallowing in the thwarts of a 
bumboat. Sir John Barleycorn staggers about disknighted, 



108 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

with his spurs hacked off his heels. It is convivial life, but 
life seen in a Claude Lorraine glass, and that glass a pothouse 
rummer blackened with the smoke of a pipe of mundungus. 

' Love levels ranks,' Lord Grizzle says, but intemperance 
has pre-eminently the power of levelling and confounding 
ranks and ages and sexes, and species even. And thus it 
happens that from so levelling a system there will result a 
terrible sameness of feature and expression, of habit, manner, 
and custom; even as drill makes ploughboys, mechanics, and 
vagabonds all machines, as similar to each other as the 
sequent spikes in an area railway ; even as slavery makes all 
negroes alike as one parched pea to another ; even as judicious 
flogging will train a pack of hounds to run and cry and stop 
as one dog. Tyranny is most potent for exacting and main- 
taining conformity ; and there is no tyranny so strong as that 
of the King of Drink, no conformity so abject and so universal 
as that of drunkards. Which must be my excuse, gentles, if I 
find no very novel characters among the bibbers at the Barge 
and Buttons. 

Stay ! one, a man ; nay, half a man ; nay, a quarter man ; 
nay, less than that, a trunk — a drunken trunk. As I live, a 
miserable little atomy, more deformed, more diminutive, more 
mutilated than any beggar in a bowl, any cul-de-jatte, than that 
famed Centaur-beggar who, as Charles Lamb phrased it, ap- 
peared to have had his equestrian half hewn off in some dire 
Lapithaean conflict. This wondrous abortion's name, if he 
have a name, is doubtful. Men call him ' Powder Dick,' 
whether in remembrance of some terrible Dartford or Houns- 
low explosion, by which his limbs were (supposititiously) 
blown off, or because his chest and face are ceaselessly covered 
with the black powdery refuse of coal-barges, or because he 
was so actually baptized, who can say ? Powder Dick he has 
been for years : blasted, blown up, crushed, torn up, or ampu- 
tated he must have been at one time or another ; but he cares 
not to say, and no man cares to ask him ; for, though an atomy, 
he blasphemes like an imp of Acheron, and, though he cannot 
fight he can bite and spit, and with one maimed arm his acci- 
dents have left him, hurl pewter pots, and broken glasses, 
and hot tobacco ash, with unerring aim. His occupation is 
that of a ferryman ; and he ferries fares 'cross river from six 
in the morning till nine in the evening all the year round. 

Not, of course, that he rows himself. He sits at the stern 
of the boat like a hideous pagod, and steers, swearing mean- 



POWDER DICK AXD HIS TRAIN. 109 

while, and c rami chin g a monstrous plug of tobacco, in the 
manner of a wild beast over a shin-bone of beef. His wife 
plies the oars — a tall. bony. ay. and a strong-boned woman — 
quick of action — quicker of imprecation and vituperation, who 
on a disputed copper would not scruple to paint your eyes as 
black as Erebus with the fire out. She is called Mrs. Dick, 
but whether that be her right name, or she have her ' marriage 
lines' to prove her legitimate connection with Mr. Dick, I 
should advise you not to be too curious in inquiring. She is 
communicative, however, when unruffled. * My fust,'' she 
vouchsafed to tell your correspondent. 'was a life-guardsman. 
and I kep him, for he carried on dreadful, and his pay wouldn't 
a kep him in blacking. My second was a navvy, and I kep 
him. So then I took up along with Powder Dick, here, and, 
rabbit him, I a ''most keeps him, for though the boat is his 
hown, and the hoars hare his hown, my harms is my hown, 
and they keeps us all afloat. A penny, please, sir.' 

Every evening at nine Mrs. Dick marches into the bar of 
the Barge and Buttons with Powder Dick, pickaback ; which 
mode of conveyance she adopts and he acquiesces in with the 
utmost coolness and complacency. Powder Dick is then set 
up on end in a corner of the bar, propped up by emptied 
measures; and there he remains, on end, guzzling fiery com- 
pounds, and roaring forth obscene songs, till his wicked old 
trunk is suffused with drink to the very stumps, and he 
tumbles or rolls on to the floor, at which period of time his 
wife, who has been drinking rum and porter mixed all the 
evening, with an inflexible countenance raises him, replaces 
him in the pickaback posture, and so exit with him towards 
that unknown slum of the purlieus of Lambeth, which may 
contain his home — if he have a home — or den. 

Powder Dick has engrossed so much of my space, has caused 
me to digress in what is itself but a long digression, because I 
consider him to be in some measure not only an original but a 
meritorious deformity — most cid-de-jattes contenting themselves 
with existing upon charity — wheeling themselves about on 
small trucks like cockhorses ; sitting on kerbstones with rude 
oil paintings spread before them, pictorially explaining how 
they came by their mutilation ; being conveyed about as riders 
to perambulating organs : or simply crouching on the cellar 
flaps of public-houses, holding hats in their mouths much in the 
fashion of poodle dogs, with an associate ummutilated) posted 
close handy to give timely intimation of the approach of the 



110 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

police. But Powder Dick, inasmuch as he is the owner and ex- 
ploiter of a flourishing ferry-boat (albeit the feme coverte, his 
wife, rows it), inasmuch as he makes an honest living and 
gets drunk on his proper earnings, may almost be considered 
in the light of a Mister Biffin, working as he does, though so 
horribly foreshortened. 

I knew another meritorious deformity once (he is dead now), 
who positively became independent through his deformed in- 
dustry, coupled with ingenuity. This worthy, being born 
endowed with qualities combining ignorance the most crass 
and most persistent, with idleness the most stedfast and per- 
severing, is reported (I speak from report, for I knew him not 
in his perfect manhood) to have wilfully cast himself three 
separate times beneath the wheels of three separate carriages 
belonging to the nobility and gentry. Three mutilations of 
the most appalling nature, obtained from the charitable and 
wealthy occupants of the carriages three separate though 
trifling annuities, amounting in the aggregate to twenty-eight 
pounds a year. I believe he enacted the part of a votary of 
Juggernaut a fourth time ; but the vehicle turning out to be a 
yellow hackney coach with a prodigious coat of arms on each 
panel, he gained little this time, save a five-pound note from 
the coach proprietor and two months' eleemosynary treatment 
in Saint Bartholomew's hospital. He then retired upon his 
annuities, and, feeling naturally lonely and in want of comfort, 
fixed his eyes and affections on a young and ugly vender of 
fruit in the public thoroughfares, to whom he was shortly 
after united, but who does not appear to have had that regard 
and consideration for the trunk of her husband, to w^hich his 
talents and well-earned competence would have seemed to 
entitle him. At the commencement of my acquaintanceship 
with him (he had then been married two years), it was patent 
and notorious that his unfeeling partner was in the frequent 
habit of leaving him for days together without sustenance, 
on-end in his chair, from which, owing to his infirmity, he 
was, it is needless to say, unable to move. Nay, as a refine- 
ment of brutality, she has been known to place at the foot of 
the chair a large footbath of mustard and water, thus insult- 
ingly and derisively taunting him with his inability to avail 
himself of that useful adjunct to the toilet. But his sufferings 
were speedily terminated. My unfortunate friend was one 
morning found dead, drowned, his stumps uppermost, and his 
head in the footbath. It was conjectured that, after a too, 



POWDER DICK AND HIS TRAIN. Ill 

copious dose of snuff (to which \ie was much addicted, and to 
which he was wont to help himself by a dexterous extension 
and elongation of his upper lip, between a bag of snuff sus- 
pended rourid his neck and his nose — thus quite rivalling the 
elephant and his trunk) — he had fallen into a violent fit of 
sneezing ; and, in the midst of his convulsive movements, had 
been precipitated from his chair into the bath, and so as- 
phyxiated. His annuities died with him, and I hope his 
unworthy widow went to the workhouse. 

One more variety of the waterside public, and I will go 
inland. Farther, much farther down river must you sail with 
me (our dray hath masts and sails now) before you come to 
the Trinchinopoly Crab. Far down below "Woolwich, with 
its huge Dockyard and Field of the Balls of Death, or Arsenal, 
and hideous convict-hulks — spruce men-of-war once, but now 
no more like men-of-war than I to Hecuba ; far down below 
Dumbledowndeary, the already-sung (which charming water- 
port hath lately been endowed with a garrison of fourteen 
real coast-guardsmen — called by the natives ' perwenters/ 
— armed with real muskets and cutlasses : and who shall say 
the coast's in danger now ?) ; — far, even below Bluehithe, 
where the gentleman hung his harriers, and Grays, and 
Purfleet, and Rainham, where the gentlemen fight for money 
— in a reach, a lonely reach, a swampy-shored reach — the 
grim sedgy banks of Essex staring from over the way, the 
salt marshes of Kent behind and on each side— here is the 
Trinchinopoly Crab, a lone white house, approached from the 
shore by a bridge over a slough of worse than Despond ; 
approachable from the western side of Kent by ferry only, 
other communication being cut off by a sludgy miry little 
estuary — Dead Man's Creek. 

The Trinchinopoly Crab is dismally white. Its frame 
might be taken for the bones of a house, bleached by the wind. 
The rickety bridge is painted white, so is the door of entry, 
with ghastly, skeleton-like chequers on either jamb, that 
remind you of the pips on the Dice of Death. The outward 
aspect of the Trinchinopoly Crab is, decidedly, not canny; 
yet within it is a very haven of maritime joviality and jollity. 
From the ships in the river come skippers, pilots, mates, 
supercargoes; from the adjacent villages come river-pilots, 
ship-chandlers, slop-dealers. From, no man knows whither 
— going, no man knows where — come strange mysterious 
men, who seem to know everything and everybody, who 



112 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

smoke cigars of inconceivable fragrance, moucher themselves 
with rainbow -hue d bandannas, and must be either smugglers 
(none of your London street ' duffers,' but real smugglers — 
fellows who could run a cargo of Hollands in the teeth of all 
my lords mustered in the Long Eoom at the Custom House), 
or else aquatic detective policemen. 

If you put your head, and subsequently your corporeality, 
into the long low coffee or tap-room (for it serves for both) of 
the Crab, you will first of all be sensible that the tobacco 
smoked by the majority of the company is of a far better and 
more fragrant quality than that vended by your lordship's 
tobacconist. Your olfactory nerves will be gratefully titillated 
by the pungent fumes of the genuine molasses-mixed Caven- 
dish ; by the incense-like suavity of the pure Oronooko ; by 
the manly, vigorous smoke of unadulterated Virginia, and the 
dream-like languor of Varinhas and Latakia. Next you shall 
observe pipes, strange in form and fashion — not alone meer- 
schaums and cherry-sticks of foreign make, but also yards of 
clay with outlandish bowls and tubes. Lastly, you are to be 
struck by the fact, that, although three-fourths of the company 
present are nautical men, you cannot detect any one nautical 
item in any portion of their attire. Sic vos non vobis. The 
stout little man in the rough brown coat and wide-awake has 
just come home from Smyrna, and is going back again in 
ballast, which, in the shape of sand, he is come down river to 
load himself with, from this portion of the Kentish coast. 
The tall, lean, wiry, sallow-faced man, wearing a flurry white 
hat, a brown frock-coat, light cord trousers very much pulled 
up over his Wellington boots, and a steel watchguard exactly 
like a patent corkscrew, is a Yankee skipper, come on shore 
to see if he can pick up some sea-stores advantageously for the 
return voyage. Observe that he has whittled away a con- 
siderable portion of the circular wooden platter on which the 
pewter pots are placed, and has spat his and his neighbour's 
spittoon quite full, and is now sowing expectoration broadcast 
on the boots of the company underneath the table. His ship 
is a temperance ship, and he is a temperance man; for, al- 
though he has to all appearances consumed two or three 
tumblers of grog already (judging from the rubicund hue of 
the bumpers supplied him), his refreshment is, in reality, 
nothing more than a harmless compound, or temperance 
cordial called raspberry. All publics frequented by those who 
6 go down to the sea in ships ' keep a store of this, and similar 



TOWDEE DICK AND HIS TRAIN. 113 

cordials, such as gingerette, lemonette, orangette, all mixing 
with sugar and hot water in a duly groggy manner, but all 
perfectly innocuous and teetotal. There are snuggeries in 
Liverpool, frequented almost solely by American captains — 
temperance captains be it understood — which have no sale at 
all for malt or alcoholic liquors. 

The fat, gray-headed, farmer-like man in the body coat, 
pepper-and-salt trousers, and brown gaiters, with a heavy 
bunch of watch-seals at his fob and a broad-brimmed hat, is 
a pilot ; not one by any means you will say resembling the 
interesting individual with bushy whiskers, snowy ducks, 
varnished hat, telescope, and black neckerchief tied in a 
nautical knot, who very properly enjoined the impertinent 
passenger to go below to his berth and trust in Providence 
on a certain fearful night : for which vide the song and Mr. 
Brandard's lithographed frontispiece thereto. The pilot I 
have first introduced you to does not answer to the lithographed 
pilot. He is not at all like him. I never saw one like him ; 
I never even saw a pilot in a pilot-coat, though I have seen 
one in a hat like a London dustman's, in a Jerry hat, in a 
costermonger's fur cap, and in a red nightcap. Never a one 
like him of the lithograph. But, my dear sir, is anything in 
life like the lithograph, or the book, or the canvas, or the pro- 
scenium picture thereof ? Is a Boyal Academy brigand like a 
Calabrian brigand ? — a Eoyal Italian Opera Swiss maiden like 
a young girl of any one of the thirteen Cantons ? Are poet- 
shepherdesses like women who tend sheep ? Are stage pea- 
sants like Buckinghamshire labourers ? Is any imitation, re- 
production, or representation of life, like life ? — of man, like 
man ? All men are liars. Put pencils or pens, or 'broidering 
needles in our hands, we straightway fall a lying, and lie our 
heads out of shape, calling that imagination, fiction, forsooth ! 

The long low room of the Trinchinopoly Crab, though by 
day a very Lybian desert of sandy floor, tenantless settles, and 
pyramid-spittoons, and drawing, perhaps, scarcely a butt of 
beer per month, does a roaring trade at night ; for there are 
always ships in the river, and boats to row, and skippers who 
have used the Crab before, and nautical tradesmen eager to 
meet them ; though this river-side house is a good mile and a 
quarter from any village, or even inhabited house. Decent, 
honest, civil, God-fearing men are these seamen-captains — the 
nobly great majority of them that is — of every port and nation. 
From the blunt whaling captains at Hull and Glasgow, to the 

i 



114 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

mighty mail steamer skippers at Liverpool or Southampton, 
they are almost invariably the same : civil of speech, quiet of 
demeanour, modest of assertion, and incapable of grandilo- 
quence, almost to a fault. They will tell you diffidently of 
the Isles of Greece that they ' were down Cerigo way once 
with fruit ;' whereas young Swallowpounce of the Treasury, 
whose Mediterranean travels I verily believe have never 
extended beyond Malta, is for ever bragging of and quoting 

1 Eternal summer gilds them yet, 
But all except their sun is set.' 

Have they been to India? Urn, yes: Calcutta, and so on, 
said as easily as ' Chelsea.' The terrible Patagonian promon- 
tory, the awful and inhospitable land of Terra del Fuego is to 
them merely The Horn ; and Venice, the Adriatic, Dalmatia, 
Styria, are all summed up in a simple ' Up the Gulf as far as 
Tryeast with hides." Farewell, ye seamen-captains, honest 
men, who as pertinaciously persist in wearing chimney-pot 
hats and frock-coats, as your pictorial and literary delineators 
are incorrigible in delineating you in large-buttoned peacoats, 
wide ducks, and flat hats. Simple-minded men, making the 
little parade you do of your travelling lore and nautical learn- 
ing — leaving the first only to be guessed at in your mahogany 
cheeks and sun-crimsoned foreheads and embrowned hands ; 
the second only to be known in the hour of danger and peril, 
when the sea runs mountains high, and the masts bend like 
whips, and the rigging writhes like the tresses of a woman 
possessed. 



X. 

MY SWAX. 

There was once a great Italian painter — the same who had a 
hand in building Saint Peter's — who, when he came to be 
nearly eighty years of age, when he was justly considered 
and renowned throughout Europe as the most learned artist 
living, as a man who knew by heart every bone, ligament, 
muscle, and vein, and could pourtray them with the most 
recondite foreshortening and the most erudite symmetry — ■ 
which, indeed, he could — designed a rough pencil sketch, 
representing a very old man (himself) seated in a go-cart, 
drawn by a little child; while underneath the drawing these 



MY SWAN. 115 

words were written : ' Ancora impara ' — ' Still he learns.' 
The octogenarian sage — the oracle of art — was wise and 
modest enough to confess how little he knew, and how much 
he had jet to learn. 

Now, though I do not pretend to the learning of Michael 
Angelo, or — I say it in all modesty — to know much about 
anything, I did natter myself that I was passably well read in 
' public ' lore — that, as I once foolishly boasted, I had gradu- 
ated in beer. Flippantly, as men of superficial acquirements 
are prone to do, I summed up the phases of ' public ' life in 
three chapters. Fatuitous scribe ! I had but broken the 
ground with the point of my spade. Insensate ! I had thought 
to do in a day what it would take years to accomplish a 
moiety of. Impotent ! I had essayed to dip the Mississippi 
dry with a salt-spoon ! 

Consider the contemplative man's recreation. The fishing 
public-house ! On the banks of a suburban stream, or by the 
towing-path of a canal, or by the mud-compelling, stream- 
restraining portals of a lock shall we find the piscatorial 
public : the Jolly Anglers, maybe, or the Izaak V\ alton, or 
very probably the Swan. What connection there can be 
between a Swan and the gentle craft I know not ; but it is a 
fact no less strange than incontrovertible, that the Swan is the 
favourite sign for fishing-houses : the White Swan, the Old 
Swan, the Silver Swan, the Swan and Hook, but the Swan, 
always. 

The Swan, my Swan — on the little fishing river Spree 
(which has been playing some astonishing freaks of late — 
overflowing its banks and depositing roach and dace in back 
kitchens and dustbins) — always puts me in mind of a very old 
man with very young legs ; for whereas it is above, as far as 
regards its upper and garret story, a quaint, moss-covered, 
thatched-roofed edifice with crooked gable ends, and an oriel 
window with lozenge-panes, it is below an atrociously modern 
erection of staring yellow brick with an impertinent stuccoed 
doorway, and the usual rhetorical conventionalities in golden 
flourishes about neat wines, fine ales, good accommodation, 
and the rest of it. This doorway faces the high omnibus road, 
and is a sixpenny ride from the Bank- — a great convenience to 
anglers whose everyday occupations are of a City or commer- 
cial cast. The sign of the Swan formerly stood in this high 
road, or at least creaked and swung within an iron frame 
affixed to a post standing there. This Swan was a brave bird 

i 2 



116 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

with a neck like a corkscrew, and a head like the griffin's in 
the City Arms. There were faint vestiges of a gold-laced 
cocked hat, and a rubicund red nose gleaming through the 
whity-brown plumage of the bird, and old folks said that 
before the house had been the Swan, it was known as the 
General Ligonier. Other old folks held out stoutly that the 
cocked hat and rubicund nose belonged to the publican's 
friend, the Marquis of Granby, while a third party swore hard 
that they were the property of Admiral Byng, and that he was 
dissignified after they had shot him. When Groundbait, the 
present landlord of the Swan, took the house, he caused the 
sign to be removed as too shabby and tarnished, and agreed 
with Joe Copal, the journeyman decorator, to paint a new one 
for a crown and a bottle of wine. Unfortunately he paid the 
money and the liquor in advance, and Joe soon after emigrated 
to Texas, leaving not only the sign unpainted, but a consider- 
able score for malt liquors and tobacco unsettled ; whereupon 
Groundbait grew moody and abstracted on the subject of signs ; 
refusing to have a new one painted, and replying haughtily to 
such friends as pressed him on the subject that ' the gentlemen 
as used the Swan knew his 'ouse was the Swan without a swan 
being painted up outside like a himage ; and that if they didn't 
they might go to any other swan or goose ;' after which he was 
wont to expel several vehement whiffs from his pipe, and knit- 
ting his brows, gaze ruefully at Joe Copal's unliquidated score, 
which to this day remains in full chalk characters behind the 
parlour door ; it being as much as Dorothy the pretty barmaid's 
place is worth to meddle with, or hint about effacing it. 
Groundbait has looked at it a good many times since the dis- 
covery of the gold-fields in Australia, as he has an idea that 
Texas may be somewhere that way: and that Joe, coming back 
repentant some day with a store of nuggets, may call in and 
settle it. 

The Swan has been a fishing-house for }^ears, not only as in 
the neighbourhood of a fishing stream and the resort of metro- 
politan anglers, but also as a species of house-of-call for fresh- 
water fishermen — a piscatorial clearing-house — a fishing news- 
exchange, a social club-house for the amateurs of the rod and 
line. 

The little bar parlour of the Swan, which is of no particular 
shape and has a paper ceiling, has a door covered on the inner 
side half by a coloured mezzotint of George the Third in jack- 
boots, on a horse like a gambolling hippopotamus, reviewing 



31 Y SWAN. 117 

one hundred thousand volunteers in Hyde Park ; half by the 
famous abacus, or slate — the tabular record of scores. Dorothy, 
the -neat-handed Phillis ' of the Swan, albeit a ready reckoner 
and an accomplished artiste in stewing carp and frying smelts, 
is not a very apt scholar; so she has devised a system of 
financial hieroglyphics to cover her want of proficiency in the 
delineation of the Arabic numerals. Thus in her money 
alphabet, a circle (o) stands for a shilling : a half moon ( (J ) 
for sixpence, a Maltese cross for a penny, and a Greek ditto 
for a halfpenny. Farthings are beneath the calculations of the 
Swan ; and pounds are represented by a very large indeed ; 
the agglomeration of a score of circles into one circumference. 
The room is hung round with badges and trophies of the 
piscatorial craft. Eods of all shapes and sizes, eel-spears, 
winches, landing-nets, Penelopean webs of fishing-tackle, 
glistering armouries of hooks, harpoons, panniers, bait-cans ; 
and in a glass case a most wonderful piscatorio-entomological 
collection of flies — flies of gorgeously tinted floss silk, phea- 
sants' feathers, and gold and silver thread — flies warranted to 
deceive the acutest of fish ; though if, viewed through a 
watery medium, the flies come no nearer Nature than these 
do, I have no great opinion of the fishes' discernment. With 
all clue reverence for the Eleusinian mysteries of fly-fishing — 
which I do not understand, be it said. Over the fire-place is 
the identical rod and line with which J. Barbell, Esq., hooked 
the monstrous and European-famed jack in the river Dodder, 
near Dublin, and in the year of grace eighteen hundred and 
thirty-nine : in one coiner are the shovel and bucket with 
and in which at the same place and time the said jack, after 
being walked seven miles down the banks of the Dodder, and 
cracking the rod into innumerable fissures (though the supe- 
rior article, one of Cheek's best, would not break), was 
ultimately landed. Conspicuous between the windows is the 
portrait of J. Barbell, Esq., a hairy-faced man, severely 
scourging a river with a rod like a May-pole ; beneath that, 
•the famous jack himself in propria persona, in a glass case, 
stuffed, very brown and horny with varnish, with great 
staring glass eyes (one cracked), and a mouth wide open 
grinning hideously. He is swimming vigorously through 
nothing at all, and has a neat fore-ground of moss and 
Brighton-beach shells, and a backing of pea-green sky. There 
are very many other glass cases, containing the mummies of 
other famous jacks, trout, roach, dace, and carp, including 



118 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

the well-known perch which was captured after being heard 
of for five years in the back waters of the Thames near 
Reading, and has a back fin nearly as large as Madame de 
Pompadour's fan. Not forgetting a well-thumbed copy of 
dear old Izaak's ' Complete Angler ;' a price-list of fishing 
materials sold at the Golden Perch or the Silver Eoach in 
London, with manuscript comments of anglers as to the 
quality thereof pencilled on the margin, and the contributions 
of the ingenious Ephemera to c Bell's Life in London, 5 cut 
from that journal and pasted together on the leaves of an old 
cheesemonger's day-book ; not forgetting these with a certain 
fishy smell prevalent, I think I have drawn the parlour of the 
Swan for you pretty correctly. The first thing you should do 
on entering this sanctuary of fishing is to keep your skirts 
very close to your person, an.d to duck your head a little — the 
air being at times charged with animal matter in the shape of 
dried entrails twisted into fishing-lines, which flying about, 
and winding round your clothes or in your hair, produce a 
state of entangelment more Gordian than pleasant. The 
chairs and other articles of furniture are also more or less 
garnished with hooks of various sizes, dropped from the parch- 
ment hook-books of the gentlemen fishermen. These protrude 
imperceptibly, but dangerously, like quills upon the fretful 
porcupine ; and it is as well to examine your chair with a 
magnifying glass, or to cause a friend to occupy it prelimi- 
narily, before you sit down in it yourself. 

If you come to the Swan to fish you cannot do better than 
tackle (I do not use the word with the slightest intention of 
punning) Groundbait, the landlord, immediately. That Boni- 
face will be but too happy to tell you the latest fishing news, 
the most approved fishing places, the neighbouring gentry 
who give permissions to fish. He knows of fish in places you 
would never dream of: he has cunningly devised receipts for 
ground-bait : his butcher is the butcher for gentles, his oil- 
shops are the shops for greaves ; he has hooks that every fish 
that ever was spawned will gorge, lines that never break* 
rods that never snap. If you would go farther a-field after an 
essay at the mild suburban angling of the Eiver Spree, he will 
put you up to rare country fishing spots, where there are 
trouts of unheard of size, eels as big as serpents, pikes so large 
and voracious that they gnaw the spokes of water-wheels ; of 
quiet Berkshire villages, where the silver Thames murmurs 
peacefully, gladsomely, innocently between sylvan banks, 



MY SYv T AN. 119 

through a green thanksgiving landscape, among little islets, 
quiet, sunny, sequestered as the remote Bermudas ; where the 
river, in fine, is a river you may drink and lave in and rejoice 
over, forgetting the bone factories and gas-works and tanneries, 
the sweltering sewerage, inky colliers, and rotting corpses 
below Bridge. 

If you come to the Swan merely as an observer of the 
world, how it is a wagging, as I do, you may take your half- 
pint of neat port with Groundbait, or shrouding yourself 
behind the cloud}?- mantle of a pipe, study character among the 
frequenters of the Swan. Groundbait does not fish much 
himself. The engineer has an objection to see himself hoist 
with his own petard. Doctors never take their own physic ► 
Lawyers don't go to law. Groundbait, the arbiter piscatoriwm, 
the oracle, the expert jure of angling, seldom takes rod in hand 
himself. He has curiously a dominant passion for leaping, 
darting the lancing pole, swinging by his hands, climbing 
knotted ropes, and other feats of strength and agility. He 
has quite a little gymnasium in his back garden, leading to 
the river — a kind of gibbet, with ropes and ladders, an erec- 
tion which, when he first took the Swan, and set up his gym- 
nastic apparatus, gave his neighbour and enemy, the Eeverend 
Gricax Typhoon, occasion to address several stinging sermons 
to the congregation sitting under him at little Adullam, 
touching the near connection between publicans and the most 
degraded of mankind, such as public executioners, with a neat 
little historical parallel concerning Mordecai and Haman. 

The angling company frequenting the Swan are varied and 
eccentric. Rarely, I am of opinion, is eccentricity so preva- 
lent as among Anglers. Take Mr. Jefferson Jebb, among his 
intimates known as Jeff. He is something in the City, that 
mysterious place, the home of so many mysterious avocations. 
Every evening during the summer months, and every Sunday 
throughout the year, he comes to the Swan to fish or to talk of 
fishing. He is intensely shabby, snuffy, and dirty, and wears a 
beaver hat brushed all the wrong way and quite red with rust. 
On one finger he wears a very large and sparkling diamond 
ring. His boots are not boots but bats — splay, shapeless, de- 
formed canoes, with bulbous excrescences on the upper leather. 
When he sleeps at the Swan, and you see the boots outside his 
door, they have an inexpressibly groggy, wall-eyed, shambling 
appearance, and sway to and fro of their own accord like the 
Logan or rocking stone in Cornwall. I think Jeff must be in 



120 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

the liabit of drinking coffee at breakfast, and, purchasing dried 
sole-skins wherewith to clear the decoction ' of the Indian 
berry, be continually forgetting to take his purchases out of 
his pockets, for there is a fishy smell about him, constant but 
indescribable. He never catches any fish to speak of. He 
does not seem to care about any. His principal delight is in 
the peculiarly nasty process of kneading together the com- 
pound of gravel, worms, and soaked bread, known as ground- 
bait, small dumplings of which ordinarily adhere to his hands 
and habiliments. He smokes a fishy pipe, and frequently 
overhauls a very greasy parchment-covered portfolio filled 
with hooks. His line or plan of conversation is consistent 
and simple, but disagreeable, consisting in flatly contradicting 
any assertion on angling, or, indeed, any other topic advanced 
by the surrounding company. This peculiarity, together with 
a general crustiness of demeanour and malignity of remark, 
have earned for him the sobriquets of the 'hedgehog,' 'old 
rusty,' ' cranky Jeff,' and the like. If he be not a broker's 
assistant, or a Custom House officer in the City, he must 
certainly be a holder of Spanish bonds, or Mexican scrip, or 
some other description of soured financier. 

The arm-chair immediately beneath the portrait of J. Bar- 
bell, Esq., is the property, by conquest, by seniority, and by 
conscription, of Mr. Bumblecherry, Captain Bumblecherry, 
who has been a brother of the angle, and a supporter of the 
Swan for twenty years. For the last five he has boarded and 
lodged beneath Groundbait's hospitable roof. In his hot 
youth he was an exciseman ; for some years he has been a 
gentleman, existing on the superannuation allowance granted 
him by a grateful country. He keeps a vehicle which he calls 
a ' trap,' but which is, in reality, a species of square wicker- 
work clothes-basket on wheels, drawn by a vicious pony. 
Bumblecherry is a very square, little old man with a red 
scratch wig, a bulbous nose, and a fangy range of teeth. He 
looks very nearly as vicious as his pony. He bids you good 
morning in a threatening manner ; scowls when you offer him 
a light for his pipe, and not unfrequently takes leave of the 
parlour company at night with the very reverse of a benedic- 
tion. He is a very bad old man ; and when he speaks to you 
looks -very much as if he would like to bite you. He does not 
believe in anything, much, except fishing, at which recreation 
he is indefatigable ; fishing at all times and all seasons when it 
is possible to fish, singing the while, in a coffee-mill voice, a 



MY SWAN. 121 

dreary chaunt, touching ' those that fish for roach and dace/ 
In the evening, when he is in a decent humour, he will 
volunteer an equally dismal stave called l The Watchman's 
nervous,' and a certain song about a wheelbarrow, of whose 
twenty -four verses I can only call to mind one, running, I 
think, 

1 The Mayor of Hull come in Ms coach, 
Come in his coach so slow— 
And what do you think the Mayor come for? 
Why, to borrow my wheelbarrow— oh, oh, oh !' 

Ad libitum. 

It is a sight to see the captain savagely fishing in all 
weathers, fair or foul ; pouring maledictions on all who dare 
to meddle with his tackle ; gloomily cooking the fish he has 
caught, or driving doggedly along in the basket-cart with the 
vicious pony — which brute anon attempts to bite crossing 
passengers, anon stands stock still, whereat Bumblecherry 
gets out and kicks him till he moves again. He abuses 
Dorothy very frequently, but as he occasionally makes her 
presents of odd hanks of floss-silk he uses in fly-making, meat- 
pies, and other confectionary, and once attempted to kiss her 
in disengaging a double-barbed hook from her dress, there is a 
report that he means to marry her, and at his decease endow 
her with the fabulous wealth he is supposed to have accu- 
mulated during his connection with the British excise. 

A frequent visitor to the Swan is a tall, high-dried French 
gentleman in a short cloak, decorated with the almost obsolete 
poodle collar. Nobody knows his name, so he is generally 
called, with reference to his foreign extraction, as the 
1 Moossoo.' He is a very assiduous, but pensive and melan- 
choly, fisherman, and, sitting on a stump with the poodle 
collar turned up over his countenance, looks very like 
' Patience on a monument.' In hot weather he will not 
disdain to take off his stockings, and, rolling up his trousers, 
fish barelegged at a considerable distance from the bank. He 
is an amateur in the breeding and care of gentles and worm- 
bait, and generally carries about with him a box of lob-worms, 
which, he laments to Mrs. Groundbait (who speaks a little 
Trench), are continually getting loose, and walking up and 
down the stairs of his house ' la camie a la main ' — an anecdote 
I venture to relate with a view to signalling a peculiarity, 
hitherto unknown, in the natural history of lob-worms. 

In summer weather a great crowd of dandy fishermen 



122 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

invade the Swan. These gay young brothers of the Angle — 
bucks of Cheapside and exquisites of the Poultry — come 
down on afternoons and Sundays in the most astonishing 
fishing costume, and laden with the most elaborate fishing- 
tackle. "Wide-awake hats of varied hue, fishing-jackets of 
curious cut, veils, patent fishing-boots, belts, pouches, winches 
like small steam-engines, so complicated are they ; stacks of 
rods, coils of lines, bait-cans painted the most vivid green : 
such are the panoplies of these youths. Tremendous is the 
fuss and pother they make about bait and hooks, elaborate are 
their preparations, bold and valorous their promises, but, 
alas ! frequently and signally lame and unsatisfactory their 
performances. With all their varied armament and intricate 
machinery, I have seen them, many a time and oft, distanced 
and defeated by a stick and a string, a worm at one end, and a 
little barelegged boy at the other. 



XI. 

THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 



I am a retired publican, and date from the days when pub- 
licans were publicans. I kept the Bottle of Hay, in Leather 
Lane, when public-houses were worth keeping. I have a 
tidy penny in the funds now, a neat little box at Hoxton, am 
an elder of my chapel, one of the committee of my Literary 
and Scientific Institution, and a governor of the Licensed 
Victuallers' Association. If I had kept my house as houses 
are kept now I might have a villa at Ealing, and be a Middle- 
sex magistrate, perhaps ; or, just as probably, I should be 
occupying apartments in the Licensed Victuallers' Alms- 
houses. I prefer my tidy funded penny and my box to both. 
Altogether I may claim to be a respectable man, for I have a 
very snug little trap (under tax) and my pony, Barrett (he 
was a butcher's before he was mine, and a swell's before he 
was a butcher's), can do something considerable in the trotting 
line. 

My trap and I and my friend Spyle, who has a neat super- 
annuation on the Customs, go about a goodish deal among 
public-houses now. You see I have a kind of liking for the 
old trade ; and there is no amusement I like so much as 
tasting the beer at a new house, or dropping in at stated 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 123 

times, and in rotation on an old one, or looking about as to 
the next probable owner of a shut-up house, or attending 
public-house auctions and the like. Something might turn up 
some day, you know, where a party could invest his little 
savings profitably ; and that is why I like to keep in with 
my distillers, Porcus and Grains, and with my old brewers, 
Spiggot, Buffie, and Bung, for business reasons, over and 
above the drop of something comfortable that they are sure to 
ask me if I will take this morning. In fact, if you could put 
me up to any snug concern drawing a reasonable number of 
butts a month, that a party could drop in to reasonable, I 
think I might hear of a bidder. 

This doesn't interfere a tittle, however, with my firm and 
settled opinion that the public line is going to ruin. To rack 
and ruin. The teetotallers, of course, have done a deal of 
harm ; but still they take a decent quantity medicinally, and 
the very fierce ones, they generally break out very fierce 
about once a month, and make up for lost time. It's the 
publicans themselves that do the injury by introducing [all 
sorts of innovations and new-fangled enticements to drink 
to their customers. As if a man wanted leading on to 
drink ! He never did in my time. The landlords themselves 
are their own enemies, and with their plate glass and gilding 
and rosewood fittings and the rest of it, they are making the 
line disrespectable. At least, I think so. A public-house 
isn't a public-house, now, but something quite different. 

IN ow, there's my old house in Leather Lane — the Bottle of 
Hay. I sold the lease, stock, goodwill, and fixtures to old 
Berrystack. He was one of the old school, as I am, and if he 
hadn't taken it into his senses to go out of them, and to be 
now in a lunatic asylum and a padded room, he would have 
carried the house l on in the old, and my manner, to this day, I 
have no doubt. Before he went mad, however, he had sense 
enough to sell the house to young Bowley, whose father was 
a gauger in the docks. The licence and Berrystack's pretty 
daughter Louisa were transferred to Bowley at the same time ; 
and as man and wife (Louisa was the prettiest hand at mixing 
a twopenn'orth, hot, and saying a civil word to the old 
gentlemen that used the house, that ever you saw) they went 
on for a year or two as comfortable as may be. But what did 
young Bowley but go to cards, and then to horse-racing and 
betting, and to wearing a horseshoe pin in his neckerchief, 
and trousers much too tight for him about the legs ? And 



124 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

where did he go afterwards but into TYhitecross Street, and 
afterwards to the Insolvent Court; and where did Mrs. 
Bowley go but off to Boulogne with the cash-box and the 
military chap (I never could abide him with his mustachoes 
and his airs) that was always hanging about the bar-parlour. 
A pretty piece of business this for a respectable house ! But, 
bad as Bowley was, the next tenant was worse. He had 
plenty of money, and all that; but I have no hesitation in 
saying that he was a fellow. A fellow. He was ashamed of 
his apron. Nothing but a full suit of black would suit my 
gentleman ; and he would stand behind the bar twiddling his 
Albert guard-chain, and, if he were asked for change, pull it 
out of a thing like a lady's reticule, which he called his 
4 port-money.' He'd better have looked to his port wine. 
He shut his house up all day Sunday, and actually tried to 
put his pot-boy into a white neckcloth ; but he, being a pot- 
boy that knew his business, and wasn't above it, told him 
plainly that he wasn't used to it, and that he had better look 
out for another young man. 

His bar, instead of being covered with the decent piles of 
halfpence and trays full of silver, that a right-minded publican 
loves to accumulate towards Saturday, was tricked out with 
all sorts of bulbs and roots, and trumpery — nasturtiums, 
heliotropes, ranunculuses, and the like ; and there wasn't an 
Italian image-man out of Leather Lane that came in to take a 
drop but he'd buy a Venus, or a Jenny Lind, or a Holy Family 
of; and these he'd stick up on gim-crack brackets under his 
tubs, and ask me with a simpering grin if I didn't think 
the rubbish classical ? Classical ! What business has a 
licensed victualler with the classics ? I could not stand this ; 
I turned to Pruffwell (this was the classical gentleman's 
name), and said I to him — 'Mr. Pruffwell, it's my belief that 
you're not acting becoming. If you're a landlord, say so ; if 
you're not, the sooner you say so, or go out of the business, 
the better;' and thereupon 1 paid for what I had had and 
walked out. He said I was an old fool ; but Mr. Batts, of 
Liquorpond Street, and Mr. Crapper, of Gray's Inn Lane, and 
little Shoulderblade, the sheriff's officer — all respectable warm 
men, who used the house — went out with me, and all said I 
had done the thing that was right. I never set my foot in 
Pruffwell's house again till he left it; but I heard that he 
went on from bad to worse afterwards : that he took a wife 
who was all curls and conceit, and was nervous and musical, 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 125 

bless us ; and that the choruses at the Wednesday Evening 
Free and Easy in the tap-room used to be drowned by Madam's 
piano-forte up-stairs jangling such variations upon Auld Robin 
Gray that his mother would nt have known him. At last he 
got a fellow with long hair and spectacles, and a turn-clown 
collar, and a tuft, to lecture upon the ' Od force,' and ' Things 
not Seen,' or things never heard of in his coffee-room ; and 
another (in a cloak and more spectacles, green this time) to 
demonstrate the ' theory of the earth's movement,' with a 
piece of string, a copper disc, like the bottom of a stew-pan 
knocked out, and an old clock dial-plate. He couldn't demon- 
strate it, it seemed, without a great deal of gin and water 
first, and turning off the gas afterwards ; and there were two 
great' coats and seven spoons missing the next morning. 
When I heard Pruffwell was countenancing such proceedings 
as these, I thought he was coming to a bad end ; and, sure 
enough, to a very bad one he came shortly afterwards. He 
got into some scrape about defrauding the gas-company out of 
their dues, falsifying the meter and tapping the main himself; 
but somehow he was too clever, and the gas got into the gin, 
and the water into that, and the sewer into that ; and the gas- 
company came in and tore, up the flooring, and spoilt the beer- 
engines, and sued him dreadfully. He ran away very quickly 
did Mr. Pruffwell after this, Albert chain, port-money, and 
all. I did hear that he went to America, where he turned 
schoolmaster, lecturer, and got into some trouble about the 
notes of a bank that had stopped payment; and, besides that, 
Mrs. PruffweL 1 was not Mrs. Pruffwell after all, and after P.'s 
disappearance, had taken to drinking dreadfully. 

All this while the Bottle of Hay was becoming dingier and 
dingier, and more dilapidated in appearance every day. The 
pots had lost their brightness, and the pewter- covered bar 
counter, which should have been clean and glistening, became 
stained and discoloured with sticky rings of treacly porter. 
When the handles of the taps got loose and unscrewed they 
were never replaced ; the glasses lost half their feet, and the 
pewter measures half their capacity of containing by dinting 
and battering. The letters and numbers wore off the gin- 
tubs ; the till contained nothing but broken tobacco pipes, 
and pock-marked, defaced, advertisement-branded and per- 
forated halfpence, which even the neediest of the customers 
had indignantly refused ; and little Puggs, the tipstaff of the 
Sheriff's Court, now pretty nearly the only regular customer 



12G GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

that remained, declared that really lie must use some other 
house, for that on three separate days the Bottle of Hay had 
been out of gin and bitters. The harp, piano, and violin that 
used to come regularly every Saturday night and give a 
musical performance in front of the door, removed to the 
Coach and Horses up the lane : and really if it had not been 
for the sign, and the old portrait of myself in the coffee-room 
(kitcat, half length, three-quarter face, representing me with 
my hand in my waistcoat, backed by a crimson velvet curtain 
and a Grecian column, and flanked by an inkstand, a hat and 
gloves, four books and an orange cut in halves) I really should 
not have recognised my old house, where I had worked hard 
for so many years, and realised such a neat little bit of pro- 
perty. Then the sheriff came in with his levy and his men 
in possession ; and for a week or so what little beer was 
required was drawn by hooked-nosed men of the Israelitish 
persuasion. Then they hung the carpets out of the window, 
and had a sale ; and three weeks afterwards I recognised my 
old arm-chair, bar-flap and beer-engine at a second-hand, shop 
in Brokers' Eow, Long Acre, higgledy-piggledy with tin tea- 
canisters, sham bookshelves, dummy chemists' drawers, bandy- 
legged counting-house desks and empty jars, labelled ' tama- 
rinds ' and ' leeches.' 

I wish they had pulled down my old house after this. I 
wish they had built a Methodist Chapel, or Baths and Wash- 
houses, or a Temperance Hall upon its site. Anything rather 
than it should have become what it is now. It was shut up a 
long time ; and I certainly had a slight twinge of melancholy 
when, passing it occasionally, I saw its doors fast closed and 
bolted and barred with the doors that had been for so many 
years on the swing, and of which the paint about the handles 
had been worn off by the hands of so many good fellows who 
had got ' comfortable * in my house so many Monday morn- 
ings and so many Saturday nights. At last the Bottle of Hay 
was let. 

The new landlord was a young, beardless man, in a coloured 
shirt and a wide-awake hat. He was one of three brothers, 
and they had public-houses all over London : one at Ber- 
mondsey, one large gin-palace somewhere over the water at a 
corner where six crowded thoroughfares met ; one in a sub- 
urban neighbourhood, very new and very improving, which 
was an omnibus house ; and an establishment in the City in 
a dark alley down Dockway, where prime ports and sherries 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 127 

were drawn from the wood, and sold at an extraordinarily low 
price per imperial quart, and white-headed old gentlemen 
whose only occupation it seemed to be to drink (I do a good 
deal in that way) , went to taste the prime wines and eat nuts 
and cheese-crumbs. Fishtail was this new young landlord's 
name, and his wide-awake hat was a green one. No other 
symptom of that colour was there in him, however, for he was 
as wide awake as his hat or a detective policeman, as cun- 
ning as a fox, as pert as a magpie, and as avaricious as a Jew. 
He wasn't above his business. He and the wide-awake were 
scudding, poking, peeping, scampering morning noon and 
night about the house during its renovation (doing up, I 
should call it). He began by pulling the house half down. 
Then he threw the ground and first floor into one, and filled 
the window with plate glass and tremendous gilt gas burners. 
Then he raised an ornamental balustrade above the coping of 
the roof, and a vase above that, and a statue of Hercules or 
somebody defying something above that, and a huge flag above 
all — to say nothing of a big gilt clock surrounded with stricco 
cornucopias and emblems, and which had an illuminated dial, 
the letters of ' B.O.T.T.L.E. O.F. H.A.Y. 0.' instead of 
numerals, and hands like ornamental fire shovels. Not con- 
tent with this, the second floor front middle window was 
blocked up with a large gas star with V.E. and the crown, 
and the rose, shamrock, and thistle, and Heaven knows what 
besides, all in gas. The house was painted from top to bottom 
in as gaudy colours as could be procured, and wherever it 
was feasible plastered over with compo mouldings and 
flourishing, ornaments. His name, Fishtail, was painted upon 
almost every imaginable part of the building, in all sorts of 
colours, and in letters so big that it was almost impossible to 
read them. The inside of the house was as much trans- 
mogrified as the outside. 

It was all mahogany — at least, what wasn't mahogany, was 
gilt carving and ground glass, with flourishing patterns on it. 
The bar was cut up into little compartments like pawnbrokers' 
boxes ; and there was the wholesale entrance, and the jug and 
bottle department, the retail bar, the snuggery, the private 
bar, the ladies' bar, the wine and liqueur entrance, and the 
lunch bar. The handles of the taps were painted porcelain, 
and green, and yellow glass. There were mysterious glass 
columns, in which the bitter ale, instead of being drawn 
lip comfortably from the cask in the cellar below, remained. 



128 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

always on view above ground to show its clearness, and was 
drawn out into glasses by a mysterious engine like an air- 
pump with something wrong in its inside. There were 
carved benches in the private bar, with crimson plush 
cushions aerated and elastic. There were spring duffers, work- 
ing in a tunnel in the wall, which you were to strike with your 
fist to try your muscular strength. There were machines to 
test your lifting power, and a weighing-machine, and a lung- 
testing machine, or ' vital-power determinator.' There were 
plates full of nasty compounds of chips, saw-dust, and grits, 
called Scotch bannocks, which were to be eaten with butter, 
and washed down by the Gregarach Staggering old Claymore 
or Doch an' Dorroch ale ; but which never should have shown 
its face in my old house, I warrant you. There were sau- 
sages, fried in a peculiar manner, with barbecued parsley, and 
a huge, brazen sausage chest, supported on two elephants, 
with a furnace beneath, from which sausages and potatoes 
were served out hot and hot all day long. There were sand- 
wiches cut into strange devices ; and cakes and tarts that 
nobody ever heard of before ; and drinks and mixtures con- 
cocted that, in my day, would have brought the exciseman 
about a landlord pretty soon, I can assure you. The soda- 
water bottles had spiral necks like glass corkscrews, and zig- 
zag labels. The ginger-beer was all colours — blue, green, 
and violet. Every inch of the Avails that was not be-plastered 
with ornaments and gilding, or bedizened with gilt announce- 
ments of splendid ales and unrivalled quadruple stouts I never 
heard of, was covered with ridiculously gaudy-coloured prints, 
puffing the 'Cead Mille Failthe Whisky,' the 'Phthisis 
Curing Bottled Beer/ recommended by the entire faculty; 
the Imperial Kartoffelnsfell-hopfbrunnen Waters bottled at 
the celebrated mineral springs of Kartoffelnsfell, under the 
immediate superintendence of the Kartoffelnsfell Government, 
all of which were to be had in splendid condition, and for 
which J. Fishtail was the sole agent. This was a nice begin- 
ning. But the worst was to come. The house was opened, 
and J. Fishtail was as busy as a bee with an opening dinner, 
which he bragged and boasted a great deal of having reported 
in the press. He did, to be sure, get a seedy chap with an 
umbrella and a hat full of old newspapers and red comforters, 
who did fires and murders, and the Lord Mayor's state foot- 
men's liveries at three-halfpence a line; and he certainly 
came to the dinner, and, when the toast of ' the press ' was 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 129 

given, prefaced by the appropriate glee of ' When winds 
breathe soft/ made a neat speech, rendered rather indistinct 
by hot liquids, in acknowledgment ; but, though he borrowed 
half a pound and stuck up an unlimited score, and though 
Fishtail became a quarterly subscriber to ' The Weekly Murder 
Sheet,' price threepence, stamped, I never heard of any account 
of his grand initiatory banquet being published therein, or in 
any other newspaper. Meanwhile, his business went on 
apace. The harp, flute, and violin would have been glad to 
come back and played outside ; but they were far too low for 
the Bottle of Hay, now. Nothing would suit Fishtail but a 
real German green baize band, composed of six dumpy, 
tawney-haired musicians from Frankfort, all with cloth caps, 
like shovels of mud, thrown on their heads, and falling over 
on the other side ; all with rings in their ears and on their 
thumbs ; and all born barons, at least, in their own country. 
These gentry put their fists into their horns, and drew out 
their trombones to amazing lengths, playing such wonderfully 
complicated tunes, and singing, meanwhile, such long-winded 
choruses, all ending with ' tra la la, tra la la, tra la-a-a-a !' 
that a dense crowd would gather round them during their 
performances, and the very policeman would refrain from 
ordering them to move on, to the great disgust of the Alabama 
Ethiopian Serenaders (from Cork Buildings, Gray's Inn Lane) 
w r ho were, in truth, only the harp, flute, and violin fallen into 
evil days, and disguised in lamp-black, pomatum, Welsh wigs 
dyed black, paper shirt collars, white calico neckcloths, ban- 
joes, tambourines, and bones. The gas star, too, and the 
illuminated clock, brought a great many customers — but what 
sort of customers were they? Italian image-men and organ- 
grinders, and Irish hodmen, and basket-women. The Irish 
and the Italians fell to fighting immediately (of course about 
the Pope), which was bad for themselves; and then they 
complained that the bar had been so altered that they hadn't 
room to fight, which was worse for the house ; for the Italians 
you see, when fighting, were accustomed to tramp in a circle, 
their knives pointing towards the centre, ready for a lunge, 
whereas the Irish always wanted a clear stage and no favour 
— at least plenty of space convenient for a spring, and ample 
room to jump upon a man, or beat his head in with a quart 
pot, or bite his nose off. The nooks and corners into which 
the bar had been cut up, rendered this very difficult of 
accomplishment; and the consequence was, that the fine 

K 



130 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

ground-glass panels and lustres, the porcelain tap-handles, 
the crystal ale columns, the gold-fish fountain (I don't think I 
mentioned that), the fine gilt and rosewood mouldings, soon 
came to be knocked off, smashed, and spoilt past mending. 
J. Fishtail was very savage at this, you may be sure, and, 
striving to turn the noisy customers out, the wide-awake hat 
was perpetually being flattened on his head with pewter 
measures, and his cut-away coat ripped up with clasp knives 
— for he was full of pluck, and did his best to keep order. 
The police naturally appeared on the scene in these disturb- 
ances, and a great deal of expense was entailed upon him in 
' squaring ' these functionaries, particularly when the Italians, 
being prevented from fighting, took to gambling on the tubs, 
at dominoes, moro, or ' buck-buck, how many fingers do I hold 
up ?' and stabbing each other quietly when they lost. The 
police had to be ' squared ' so often under these circumstances, 
that the little court by the side door was half-lined with pots 
of half-and-half, which the municipals slipped off their beat 
to drink on the sly ; and as it was, Fishtail — albeit, as harm- 
lessly inclined as any landlord — was always in trouble with 
the magistrates, and having his licence endorsed, and being 
fined. He grew into awful disfavour with the licensing 
authorities at Clerkenwell Green, where Major Blueblasis, of 
Tottenham, once stated his conviction that the Bottle of Hay 
was an ' infamous den ; ? and if Inspector Buffles had not 
stood Fishtail's friend he would have lost his licence, and the 
spite of his enemy Ditcher, who keeps the Italian Stores beer- 
shop in the lane, and has been trying after a spirit licence 
these five years, would have been gratified. 

Then he got into trouble about his dry skittle-ground. 
When my old house was near, I had as neat, and as good, and 
as dry a skittle-alley as any in Clerkenwell parish. Many 
and many have been the respectable tradesmen that have 
played there — good warm men — moral men, and ex-church- 
wardens. The ; setter-up ' made fifteen shillings a week 
clear, all the year round. Many, too, have been the rumps 
and dozen ordered in my house after matches, aye, and paid 
for. J. Fishtail of course was too go-ahead a young gentle- 
man to be contented with a dry skittle-ground with plenty of 
sawdust and one gas jet, and the pins and balls (like wooden 
Dutch cheeses) painted on the door-jambs. Oh no ! he must 
have an American Bowling Alley, with more mahogany, more 
gilding, more ground-glass shades to the gas-burners, more 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 131 

crimson-covered benches, a scorer or marker, who played 
tricks with a grand mahogany board like a railway time-table, 
instead of using the old legitimate chalk, and a flaring trans- 
]3arency outside, representing General Washington playing 
skittles with Doctor Franklin. Of course there was an 
additional bar for the use of the skittle -players, where the 
scorer, who wore a very large shirt collar and a straw hat, 
and was at least a General in America — mixed and sold 
c American Drinks :' brandy cock-tails, gin-slings, egg-noggs, 
timber-doodles, and mint-juleps, which last tasted like very 
bad gin and water, with green stuff in it, which you were 
obliged to suck through a straw instead of swigging in the 
legitimate manner. A fine end for my dry skittle-ground to 
come to ! 

It hadn't been open a month before Dick the Brewer, Curly 
Jem Simmons and Jew Josephs, all notorious skittle-sharps, 
found it out and made it a regular rendezvous for picking up 
flats. They soon picked up young Mr. Poppinson, the rich 
pawnbroker's son, who had twenty thousand pounds and 
water on the brain, and has since gone through the Court. 
They picked him up to some tune. It wasn't the games he 
lost on the square (which were few), or the games he lost on 
the cross (which were many), or the sums he was cheated of 
at the fine slate billiard table up stairs, or the bottles of cham- 
pagne he stood (champagne at my old house in Leather 
Lane !) ; it was the dreadful deal of money he lost at betting : 
— fifties that Dick the Brewer couldn't cross the alley in 
three jumps, ponies that Curly Jem couldn't name the win- 
ners of the Derby and Oaks for ten years running — even fives 
that Jew Josephs couldn't turn up a Jack four times out of 
four. Poor young Mr. Poppinson ! He ruined himself and 
his poor child of a wife (a little . delicate thing you migl t 
blow away with a 'puff at most) and his poor old wide wed 
mother who sold herself up, and pawned her comfortable 
little annuity for her wayward son. I met him the other 
day — he is but a boy still — flying in rags ; and said I to 
myself there are not many people who pass this scarecrow 
who would believe, were they told it, that in two or three 
years he managed to squander away twenty thousand golden 
pounds, not in horse-racing, not at Crockford's, not on 
actresses and dancing-girls, not even in foreign travel, but 
between the skittle-alleys and billiard-tables and tap-rooms of 
three or four low public-houses. I have seen life and a many 

k 2 



132 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

phases of it, and know how common these cases are. It is 
astonishing how often those who spend the most enjoy and 
see the least for their money. I met a man the other day- 
ragged, forlorn, with no more fat upon him than wonld grease 
a cobbler's bradawl. Now I had known this man when he was 
worth ten thousand pounds. He had spent every penny of 
it. ' How on earth did you manage it ?' I asked him, for I 
knew that he never drank, or had any ambition to be what 
you call a swell. ' Ah,' said he, with a sigh, * I played.' 
' What at ?' 1 asked again, thinking of rouge-et-noir, roulette, 
or chicken hazard. 'Bagatelle,' says he. Ten. thousand 
pounds at bagatelle — at a twopenny-halfpenny game of knock- 
ing a ball about with a walking-stick, and that a child could 
play at ! Yet I dare say he told the truth. Just similarly 
young Mr. Poppinson went to ruin in J. Fishtail's American 
Bowling Alley; and when in desperation he gave Curly Jem 
Simmons and Jew Josephs in charge for swindling him (and 
they were discharged, of course), people did say that J. Fish- 
tail was in league with Jew Josephs ; stood in with the whole 
gang, and had as much to do with cheating Mr. Poppinson as 
anybody. At all events he got a very bad name by the trans- 
action. 

Just at this^ time, 1 think, 1 was taken very bad with the 
rheumatism, and, lying up at Hoxton, lost sight of J. Fishtail. 
I expected to jfind him in ' The Gazette ' by the time I was able 
to be on my feet and about again ; but the next time I looked 
in at my old house I found him still in Leather Lane, and 
heard that he was carrying on worse than ever. He had been 
satisfied with barmaids for some time, and saucy minxes they 
were too, all ribbons and airs, together with a very fast young 
barman who was always making up his betting-book when he 
should have been attending to the customers ; and had run 
matches, so I heard — the wretch — upon i a turnpike-road in 
pink drawers, with a ribbon tied round his head. But what 
do you think J. Fishtail's next move was ? To have a Giant 
as a barman ! As I live, a Giant. 

He was a great, shambling, awkward, bow-legged, splay- 
footed brute, considerably more than seven feet high, and as 
great a fool as he was a creature. He had a head like an ill- 
made slack-baked half-quartern loaf, inclining to the sugar- 
loaf form at the top ; or perhaps a bladder of lard would be a 
better comparison. His little lack-lustre eyes were like two 
of No. 6 shot poked into the dough anyhow. His mouth 



THE BOTTLE OF HAY. 133 

'was a mere gash, and he slobbered. His voice was a shrill 
squeak, with one gruff bass note that always turned up when 
it wasn't wanted, and oughtn't to have been heard. He had 
at least four left hands, and spilt half the liquids that he drew, 
and was always breaking his long shins over stools or any- 
thing that came handy — as almost everything seemed to do, 
in that sense. To see him in his huge shirtsleeves, with 
his awkward beefy hands hanging inanely by his side, and 
his great foolish mouth open, was disgusting : he was a pillar 
of stupidity, a huge animated pump with two handles, and 
not worth pumping. He took to wearing a little boy's cloth 
cap at the back of his monstrous ill-shaped head, which made 
him look supremely ridiculous. What his name was I never 
knew or cared to inquire ; but he was generally known as 
1 Big Bill,' or the ' Giant Barman.' Of course he had been 
exhibited before the Queen and the principal Courts of 
Europe, and was patronised by all the royal families extant ; 
and a gigantic lithographic representation > of him in a full 
suit of black with a white neckcloth, exhibiting his bigness in 
the private parlour of Windsor Castle, before her Majesty and 
a select assembly, all the ladies of which wore feathers and all 
the gentlemen stars and garters, was framed and glazed in 
J. Fishtail's bar ; while a copy of it in coarse wood engraving 
was placarded half over London. He had been Professor 
Somebody once on a time I believe ; and had squeezed up 
quart pots, lifted hundred weights of iron with his little 
finger, and held bars of lead in his teeth ; but where Fishtail 
picked him up was not known : some said in a caravan at a 
fair, some sweeping a crossing, some in a ferry steamboat at 
Liverpool where he amused the company who crossed from 
the landing stage at Birkenhead. He ' drew ' — as the play 
acting people say — rather satisfactorily, at first, and was 
goaded on by J. Fishtail to ask everybody to treat him to six- 
penn'orth of brandy and water for the good of the house — the 
consumption of which sixpenn'orths made him maudlin 
drunk ; staggering on his long legs, crying to go home to 
Worcestershire (where he came from originally, I suppose), 
and at last falling all of a huge heap in a corner. His ad- 
mirers, however, were soon confined to people who had half a 
pint of beer and stared stupidly at him for half an hour 
together ; and as he was totally useless as a barman, and 
broke more glasses than he was worth, J. Fishtail soon gave 
him his travelling ticket and started him. 



134 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

J. Fishtail had not done enough to degrade my old house 
yet. Not a bit of it. ' You'd better have a dwarf, Fishtail,' 
I said to him in my quiet chaffing way (I always had a turn 
for satire). ' P'raps a Miss Biffin would suit you, or a pig-faced 
lady for a barmaid. What do you think of a "What is it?" 
or a spotted girl ? You had better have a Eumtifoozle, and 
put my old house on wheels, and hang my old portrait outside 
for a placard, and stand at the door yourself and cry, " Walk 
in, walk in and see the Eumtifoozle, two thousand spots on 
his body, no two alike ; two thousand spots on his tail, no two 
alike ; grows a hinch and a half every hanimal year, and has 
never yet come to his full growth ; the Eumtifoozle which the 
proprietor would'nt sell to George the Fourth, saying : ' No, 
George the Fourth, you shall not have our Eumtifoozle ; for 
the Eumtifoozle has a foot like a warming-pan, and a body 
like the keel of a vessel, and a tail that would astonish a 
donkey.' " Try that, Fishtail.' ' Wait a bit/ says he. Three 
days afterwards he came out with the fat barmaid. 

Ugh! the monster. She. was a lump of suet. She was 
a dollop of dripping, a splodge of grease. The poor thing 
was so helplessly fat that she could neither stand nor walk 
without difficulty ; and all she could do was to crouch lan- 
guidly in a wide chair, baring her horribly fat arms to the 
curious customers. She drew at first a little, and was profit- 
able, and people turned faint directly they saw her layers and 
creases of fat and her quintuple chin, and were obliged to 
have three penn'orths of brandy ; but they never came again, 
oh, no ! and the fat barmaid soon followed the giant. 

After this there came a bit of a lull in the way of monsters : 
but J. Fishtail was not tired. The cholera was very bad, and 
Leather Lane being a nice, teeming, no-washing neighbour- 
hood, they just died off in it and about it like sheep. Out 
comes J. Fishtail with an infallible specific for the cholera — 
brandy and something, which took wonderfully and paid, for 
it made people very ill immediately, and compelled them to 
have more brandy, without anything to set them all right 
again. The cholera died away, and Fishtail was hesitating 
between another giant who could sing beautifully, and a 
bearded lady, and an innocent-looking young lady, with pink 
eyes and long flaxen hair like floss silk, and w r as reported to 
have killed a man with a chopper, and would have been a 
great catch, if she would have come down to his terms, when 
the Bloomer costume came out. Straightway, Fishtail put 



CITY SPECTRES. 135 

his two barmaids into variegated satin trousers and broad- 
brimmed hats. I rejoice to say that this move turned out an 
egregious failure. The increase of frequenters to the Bottle 
of Hav was confined to blackguard boys, who blocked up the 
doorways, whooping, and performing on the bones or pieces 
of slate : but, as they could see no more of the costume than 
the broad-brimmed hats, they grew disgusted, and made irre- 
verent remarks, till the poor girls did nothing but take refuge 
in the bar-parlour and cry. and Fishtail was compelled, sorely 
against his will, to allow them to assume their pioper attire. 

More monsters ; and such a monster this time. James 
Fishtail had the audacity, the impiety, the indecency, to 
engage and set up in a Christian bar a painted savage. 
Whether the wretch was a CafYre, or a Zooloo something, or a 
Hottentot, or a Krooman. or an Ashantee, it matters not : but 
there he was, all dirt and cock's feathers, and paint and 
leopard skin. He was a miserable, deformed creature, with 
bones through his nose, and ears, and chin, of course, and 
eyes which he was instructed to roll, and teeth to chatter 
continually. At first he was allowed to go through his na- 
tional performances of the chace, war, &c, before the bar, 
with a hatchet, and a bow and arrows, and a string of beads ; 
but he lost his temper so frequently, and tried to bite Fishtail, 
and to make ferocious love to the barmaids, that his sphere 
of action was limited. So J. Fishtail had him penned up in a 
comer of the bar with stools and pots, where he subsided into 
a state of helpless stupidity ; but he was wont, at times, to 
howl so piteously. and to make such frantic efforts to escape, 
that people cried shame, and Fishtail sent him back to the 
showman who called himself his guardian, and had bought 
him for two cows and a yard of red cloth somewhere out at 
the Cape of Good Hope. 

I was so out of patience with this last want of common 
propriety on the part of Fishtail, that I solemnly discarded 
him, and have never entered his house since. 



XII. 

CITY SPECTRES. 



In the Royal Exchange there always were, and are, and will 
be, rows of gaunt men, with haggard countenances, and in 
seedv habiliments, who sit on the benches ranged against the 



136 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

walls of the arcades ; sit, silently, immoveably, with a stern 
and ghostly patience, from morn till dusk. These shabby 
sedentaries have long haunted me. I call them City Spectres. 
I have passed through 'Change as early as nine o'clock in the 
morning, and found the Ghosts there ; I have passed through 
it just as it was about to close, and found them there still — 
silent, unalterable in their immobility ; speechless in the 
midst of the gabble and turmoil, the commercial howls, and 
speculative shrieks of high 'Change. I have gone away from 
England, and, coming back again, have found the same Ghosts 
on the same benches. They were on the Old Exchange ; 
they were on the ' Burse ' in Sir Thomas Gresham's time, I 
have no doubt ; and when the ' coming man ' — the Anglo-New- 
Zealander of Thomas Babington Macaulay — arrives to take his 
promised view of the ruins of St. Paul's, he will have to place 
in the foreground of his picture, sitting on crumbling benches, 
in a ruined Exchange, over-against a ruined Bank, the City 
Spectres, unchangeable and unchanged. 

What do they do on Sundays and holidays, and after 'Change 
hours? What did they do when the Exchange was burnt 
down, and the merchants congregated first at the Old South 
Sea House, and then in the courtyard of the Excise Office, in 
Broad Street ? Are they the same men, or their brothers, or 
their cousins, who sit for hours on the benches in St. James's 
Park, staring with glazed, unmeaning eyes at the big Life- 
Guardsmen and the little children ? Are they the same men 
who purchase half a pint of porter, usurp the best seat (upon 
the tub, and out of the way of the swing-door) before the bar, 
to the secret rage of the publican? Are, they connected with 
the British Museum spectres — the literary ghosts — who pass 
the major part of the day in the Eeading-room, not reading — ■ 
for their eyes always seem to me to be fixed on the same spot, 
in the same page of the same volume, of the Pandects of 
Justinian — but snuffing, with a grimly affectionate relish, 
the morocco leather-laden atmosphere, and silently hugging 
the comfortable chairs and tables, luxuriating in the literary 
hospitality of Britain — the feast of paper-knives and eleemo- 
synary quill-pens, the flow of well-filled and gratuitous leaden 
inkstands ? 

Yet these City Spectres must live in their spectral 
fashion. They must eat. They must drink, even ; for I have 
observed that not a few of them have noses of a comfortable 
degree of redness. Who supplies them with food and rai- 



CITY SPECTKES. 137 

merit ? Who boards and lodges them ? Who washes them ? 
— no ; that last interrogation is certainly irrelevant ; for the 
City Ghosts, both as regards their persons and their linen, 
appear to be able to do without washing altogether. 

I used to ask myself, and I still do ask myself, these ques- 
tions about the City Spectres with distressing pertinacity ; I 
form all sorts of worrying theories concerning them. By 
dint, however, of considerable observation, of unflagging 
industry in putting ' this and that together,' and, perhaps, of 
a little stretching of possibilities into probabilities, and pro- 
babilities into certainties, I have managed to cover the dry 
bones of the Spectres of the Eoyal Exchange with a little 
commercial flesh and blood. I have found local habitations 
and names for them. I assume avocations which occupy 
them even as they sit in idle ghostliness on the benches. I 
discover incomes which cover their meagre limbs with mil- 
dewed raiment ; which find some work for their lantern jaws 
in the way of mastication ; and which give a transient rubi- 
cundity to their sometimes livid noses. I have found out— 
or at least think I have found out — who the City Ghosts are ; 
how and where they live ; what they were before they were 
ghosts; and how they came to bench-occupying and to 
ghosthood. 

Take that tall Ghost who sits in the portion of the arcade 
called the Wallachio-Moldavian walk, on the bench between 
the advertisements setting forth the approaching departure of 
the ' Grand Turk, A. 1, and copper-bottomed for Odessa,' and 
the pictorial chromo-lithographic placard, eulogising, in so 
disinterested a manner, the virtues of Mr. Alesheeh's magic 
strop. See him once, and forget him if you can. His coun- 
tenance is woebegone : his hat is battered in the crown, torn 
in the brim, worn away in the forepart, by constant pulling 
off; napless long since ; but rendered factitiously lustrous by 
the matutinal application of a wet brush ; his satin stock — 
black once, brown now — fastened at the back with a vicious 
wrench and a rusty buckle : his sorry body-coat (Spectres 
never wear frock-coats), tesselated on the collar and elbows 
with cracked grease -spots ; torn at the pockets with continuous 
thrusting-in of papers ; dotted white with the tombstones of 
dead buttons : his shrinking, withered, shame-faced trousers : 
his boots (not Bluchers, but nearly always Wellingtons) 
cracked at the sides and gone at the heel, the connection still 
preserved by the aid of a red-hot poker and gutta percha. I 



138 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

know all about that Ghost. He passed to the world of spectres 
in 1825. He must have been that head clerk in the great 
banking firm of Sir John Jebber, Jefferson, and Co., which 
speculated somewhat too greedily in the Patent Washing, 
Starching, Mangling, and Ironing Company ; in the Amalga- 
mated Dusthole, Breeze Exportation, and Cinder Consumption 
Company ; in the Eoyal Eat, Cat, and Eabbit Fur Company 
(Incorporated by Eoyal Charter) ; in the Imperial Equitable 
Spontaneous Combustion Association for Instantaneous Illu- 
mination (in connection with the Northern Lights Office) ; 
in the Anglico-Franco -Mexico Mining Company for the Eapid 
Diffusion of Quicksilver all over the World ; in Baratarian 
(deferred) Bonds. When the panic of '25 came, and there 
was a rush on Jebber' s bank, and a line of carriages ex- 
tended from Lombard Street to Ludgate Hill (for most of 
the aristocracy bankeda t Jebber's), it was the Spectre who 
enacted the bold stroke of policy, of having heavy coal- 
waggons driven artfully into the line of vehicles between 
Birchin Lane and Nicholas Lane ; and of raising an alarm of 
6 mad dog ' at the corner of Pope's Head Alley, whereby the 
stream of customers, rabid to draw out their deposits, was 
arrested for hours. 'T was he who suggested to the firm the 
artful contrivance (first practised by a larger establishment) 
of paying heavy cheques in sixpences ; but all, alas ! in vain. 
The firm had to be removed from Lombard Street to the 
Bankruptcy Court, in Basinghall Street. Jebber went into a 
lunatic asylum ; the Miss Jebbers went out (poor things !) as 
governesses; and Jefferson, with the Co. emigrated — some 
people said with the cash-box — to the land of freedom ; 
where he became principal director of that famous banking 
company, the five dollar notes of which were subsequently 
in such astonishing demand as shin plasters and pipe-lights. 
Their head clerk went, straightway, into the Ghost line of 
business, and has never given it up, The other clerks found 
easily and speedily berths in other establishments ; but, 
malicious people said that the Ghost-clerk knew more about 
that bundle of bank notes, which was so unaccountably miss- 
ing, than he chose to aver. He did not give satisfactory 
information, either, about the shares in several of the com- 
panies we have enumerated, and no one would employ him ; 
so he became an accountant, with no accounts to keep ; and 
an agent, with no agencies. Then he was secretary to that 
short-lived association, ' The Joint-Stock Pin-Collecting Com- 



CITY SPECTEES. 139 

pany.' Then lie got into trouble about the subscription for 
the survivors of the * Tabitha Jane,' Mauley, master ; his old 
detractors, with unabated malice, declaring that there never 
was a * Tabitha Jane,' nor a Mauley, master. He sells corn 
and coal on commission now — not at first-hand ; but for those 
who are themselves commission agents. He is a broker's 
4 man in possession,' when he can get a job. He does a bit 
of law writing, a bit of penny-a-lining, a bit of process-serv- 
ing ; — an infinity of those small offices known as ' odd jobs.' 
He picks up a sorry crust by these means, and is to be heard 
of at the bar of the Black Lion. He is sober; but, upon 
compulsion, I am afraid. If you give him much beer, he 
weeps, and tells you of his bygone horse and gig ; of his box 
at Shooter's Hill ; of his daughter Emily, who had the best of 
boarding-school educations (and married Clegg, of the Great 
Detector Insurance Office), and who won't speak to her poor 
old father, now, sir : of his other daughter, Jenny, who is 
kind to him ; although she is mated with a dissolute printer, 
whose relations are continually buying him new founts of type, 
which he is as continually mortgaging for spirits and tobacco. 
Poor old Ghost ! Poor old broken-down, spirit-worn hack ! 
"When great houses come toppling down, how many slender 
balustrades and tottering posts are crushed along with the 
massive pillars ! 

Here is another Spectre of my acquaintance, who has been 
a ruined man any time these twenty years; but is a very 
joyous and hilarious Ghost, notwithstanding. Though utterly 
undone, he sits cheerfully down all day on his accustomed 
bench in the Bengalee walk, beating the devil's tattoo with 
mirthful despair on the Exchange flags. Bless you, he has 
thriven on ruin, He lives on it now. Burnt out four times 
— broken both legs— bed-ridden wife— child scalded to death 
— execution on his poor l sticks,' at this very moment. He 
is, you will please observe, no begging-letter writer ; he 
would scorn the act. You can come round to his ' place ' 
now, if you like, and judge of his total wreck for yourself; 
here is the letter of Alderman Fubson, condoling with him ; 
and, could you lend him half a crown ? 

Turn round another arcade into the Austro-Sclavonian 
walk, and sympathise with this melancholy Spectre in the 
hat pulled over his brews, and the shabby cloak with the 
mangy fur collar. ISo clerk, cashier, or stock-broker's assist- 
ant has he been ; but, in times gone by, a prosperous merchant, 



140 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

one who walked on 'Change, rattling his watch-chain ; who 
quoted prices with a commanding, strident voice ; who awed 
the waiters at Garraway's, at the Cock, in< Threadneedle 
Street, at the New England, and at the Anti-Gallican ; 
whose name was down in every charity and on every com- 
mittee ; who carried a gold snuff-box in his hand, and his 
gloves and silk handkerchief together with his bank-book, in 
his hat. He failed ; and his brother allows him a small 
stipend. His hat is now crammed with the records of defunct 
transactions ; memoranda of mythical bargains ; bills of lading 
referring to phantom ships that never were loaded ; old blank 
bills of exchange, with the name of his firm (when it had a 
name) curiously flourished thereon in copper-plate ; his 
former seal of office ; a greasy cheque-book, with nothing but 
tallies telling of sums long since drawn from his banker's ; 
bits of sealing-wax ; his bankrupt certificate ; his testimonials 
of integrity from his brother merchants. These have an 
abiding place in his pockets. He has a decayed pocket-book, 
too, bulging out with prospectuses of dead companies full of 
sound and flourish, signifying nothing. He sits alone, and 
aloof from his brother Ghosts ; not indulging even in the 
silent freemasonry of these commercial phantoms. The 
greatest favour you could do him, would be to send him to 
get a cheque cashed for you (he is perfectly honest), or to 
leave a bill for acceptance. The trembling eagerness with 
which he would present the magic document, and answer the 
bland inquiry of the cashier as to ' how he w ould have it ; ' 
the delirious semblance of business he would put into the 
mere act of dropping ' this first of exchange ' into the box 
appointed to receive it, would be quite affecting. When he 
is not sitting on 'Change, I can picture him wandering 
furtively about Lombard Street, peering anxiously through 
the half-opened doors when customers go in and out ; or 
sauntering along Cheapside ; glancing with melancholy looks 
at the forms of bills of lading, charter-parties, and policies of 
insurance, displayed in the windows of the stationers' shops ; 
scrutinising the strong-backed ledgers, day-books, and journals, 
in their brave binding of vellum and red, thinking meanwhile 
— miserable man — that their glories are no longer for him ; 
that he hath done with ink, black, red, and blue ; that ' cash 
■ — debtor — contra — creditor,' have no longer music for his 
ears. In the evening, at the shabby coffee-house where he 
takes his meal, nought strikes him in yesterday's ' Advertiser/ 



CITY SPECTRES. 141 

save the list of bankrupts. In bed he is haunted — ghost as 
he is— by the ghosts of buried hopes, by tipstaffs, by irate 
Commissioners, and by fiats to which he has neglected to 
surrender. 

As the late Mr. Kothschild was called the ' Pillar of the 
Exchange,' so seemeth this other old phantom. He has been an 
Exchange Spectre since ever there were Exchanges or Ghosts 
at all. He puzzles me. I can weave histories, find genealogies, 
dovetail circumstances for all the other mysterious Bourse- 
haunters ; but this silver-haired apparition is a mystery 
inscrutable. Centuries of commercial ghostliness seem hover • 
ing in the innumerable furrows of his parchment face, in the 
multitudinous straggling locks of his dull, lustreless white 
hair. Some garment he has on — whether a coat, a cloak, or a 
gaberdine, I will not be bold enough to say — which, reaching 
from his neck to his heels, allows you to see nothing but his 
furrowed face, and lean, long hands clasped before him. 
How long has he haunted the city of London ? Did he linger 
in Paul's Walk, or in the Boundhouse of the Temple Church 
in Charles's days, when business, intrigue, and devotion were 
so curiously mingled in Christian temples : when mounte- 
banks vended their wares by clustered pillars, and dirty- 
surpliced choristers pursued jingling cavaliers for 'spur- 
money?' Was he a City Ghost when ladies in sacks, and 
gallants in cut velvet and embroidery, came to gamble South 
Sea shares in 'Change Alley ? Did he haunt 'Change when 
merchants appeared thereon, who had had their ears cut off 
by the Spaniards in Honduras : when bargains were made for 
cash in negro flesh ? Does he remember Lord Mayor Beckford, 
Fauntleroy, and Eowland Stevenson ? Can he have been the 
broker for the Poyais Loan? I should not be surprised to 
hear that his recollection extended to Alderman Eichard 
Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London ; or to that top- 
ping wine-merchant who c in London did well,' and ' who 
had but one daughter, he loved very well.' 

City Spectres, like the rest of their order, are, for the most 
part, silent men. Their main object seems to be to impress 
the spectator, by the inert force of taciturnity, with an idea 
of the weighty business they have on hand. A few, however, 
are talkative ; some, as I know to my sorrow, are garrulous. 
Woe be unto you if you have ever been in the company of, or 
have the slightest acquaintance with, the talkative Ghost ! 
Although, to say the truth, when he wants to talk, he will talk, 



142 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and is not even solicitous of an introduction: he thinks he 
knows you ; or he knew your father, or he knows your wife's 
second cousin, or he knows somebody very like you; and, 
upon the strength of that knowledge, he takes you quietly, 
but firmly, by the button — he holds you in his ' skinny hand ' 
as tightly as if you were the wedding guest and he the Ancient 
Mariner ; and, for all that you beat your breast, you cannot 
choose but hear. You listen like a three-years' child, while 
this ancient bore speaks on, discoursing of his grievances ; of 
his losses ; of the ' parties ' he knows, or has known ; of his 
cousin, who, — would you believe it, my dear sir? — drives 
into the City every morning in a carriage and pair, with a 
powdered footman in the rumble. All this, he speaks in a 
low and earnest, though distressingly rambling, tone ; and his 
brother Ghosts in the distance — as if believing he had really 
business to transact with you — clutch their umbrellas, and bend 
their dull eyes on both of you with looks of jealous curiosity. 

That substantial Spectre, who holds me in spirit- wearying 
conversation; who speaks in a low, hoarse, secret kind of 
voice, with long and bitter words, was an attorney — a City 
attorney — in large practice ; and, for some alleged malprac- 
tices, was struck off the Eolls. He has been a Spectre and a 
bore ever since. You must hear his case ; you must hear the 
scandalous, the unheard-of manner in which he has been 
treated. Eead his statement to the public, which the news- 
papers would not insert ; read his letter to Mr. Justice Bull- 
wiggle, which that learned functionary never answered ; read 
his memorial to Lord Viscount Fortyshins, which was an- 
swered, and that was all. Only wait till he has the means to 
publish a pamphlet on his case. Meanwhile, read his notes 
thereupon. Never mind your appointment at three : what's 
that to justice ? 

Even as he speaks, a slowly gibbering army of Ghosts who 
have grievances start before you ; Ghosts with inventions 
which they can't afford to patent, and which unscrupulous 
capitalists have pirated; Ghosts who can't get the Prime 
Minister to listen to their propositions for draining Ireland in 
three weeks, or for swamping the National Debt in a day ; 
Ghosts against whose plans of national defence the War 
Office door has been more than once rudely shut ; Spectres 
who, like Dogberry, have had losses ; Ghosts who when in 
the flesh (but they never had much of that) were shrunk and 
attenuated, with interminable stories of fraudulent partners ; 



CITY SPECTKES. 143 

Ghosts who have long been the victims of fiendish official 
persecutions : lastly, and in particular, that never-to-be- 
forgotten and always-to-be-avoided Ghost, who has had a 
Chancery suit on and off for an incalculable number of years ; 
who has just been with his lawyers, and is going to file a bill 
to-morrow. Alas, poor Ghost ! ' Be still, old mole ; there 
is no hope for thee !' 

There is a genealogical Ghost, eyeing me with devouring 
looks, that bode no conversational good. He only wants one 
baptismal certificate to prove that he is somebody's great- 
great-grandson, and to come into twenty thousand a year. 
Let him but earn, beg, or borrow a crown, and forthwith in 
the ' Times ' comes out an advertisement, ' to parish clerks 
and others.' — There is a sporting Ghost, with a phantom 
betting-book, who tells you, in a sepulchral voice, of ' infor- 
mation ' about ' Job Pastern's lot ;' and that he can give you 
a * tip ' for safe odds on such and such an ' event.' — A Ghost 
there is, too, in mustachoes, who is called, on the strength of 
those appendages, ' Captain,' and is supposed to have been 
embodied in some sort of legion in Spain, at some time or 
another. 

Talkative or taciturn, however, here these poor spectres 
sit or loiter during the day, retiring into dark corners when 
genuine business begins, and the merchants and brokers come 
on 'Change ; always, and without intermission, seeming to be 
here, yet prowling by some curious quality of body or spirit 
in other City haunts ; — in Garra way's, and in the Auction 
Mart ; in small civic coffee-houses and taverns ; in the police • 
courts of the Mansion House ; in Guildhall and the Custom 
House. 

In Bartholomew Lane wander another race of perturbed 
spirits, akin in appearance and mysterious demeanour to the 
Exchange Spectres ; yet of a somewhat more practical and 
corporeal order. These are the ' lame ducks ;' men who 
have once been stock-brokers — wealthy ' bulls,' purse-proud 
' bears ;' but who, unable to meet certain financial liabilities 
on a certain settling day, have been compelled to retire — who 
have ' waddled,' as is the slang of Cambists — from the parlia- 
ment of money -brokers. Yet do they linger in the purlieus 
of the beloved Capel Court, even as the Peri waited at the 
gates of Paradise : yet do they drive small time bargains 
with very small jobbers, or traffic in equivocal securities and 
shares in suspicious companies. They affect the transaction 



144 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

of business when they have none to transact; and, under 
cover of consulting the share-list of the day, or the City 
intelligence in a newspaper, they furtively consume Aber- 
nethy biscuits and ' Polony ' sausages. 

Once, however, in about five-and-twenty years, do they cast 
off their slough of semi-inactivity ; once even in that period 
do the Spectres of the Eoyal Exchange start forth into life 
and action. For, look you, once in every quarter of a cen- 
tury — sometimes more frequently — do the men, women, and 
children run stark, staring, raving, ranting mad. They have 
a mania. Now for gold-digging in American Dorados; now 
for South Sea fisheries; now for joint-stock companies, for 
doing everything for everybody ; now for railways ; now for 
life-assurance. Everybody goes crazed for shares. Lords, 
ladies, divines, physicians, chimney-sweeps; all howl for 
shares. They buy, sell, barter, borrow, beg, steal, invent, 
dream of shares. Bank-notes and prospectuses fly about 
thick as the leaves in Vallambrosa ; men are no longer mere 
human beings ; but directors, provisional committee-men, 
auditors and trustees. The mania continues, and the spectkes 
arise. They become stags. Capel Court resounds with their 
shrill bargains ; and, the spectre of a moment before stands 
erect, blatant, defiant, a stag of ten tynes. Away with the 
appointment with the man who never comes ; away with the 
delusive commission on corn and coals ; away with the phan- 
tom bill in the mythical Chancery ; away with the air-drawn 
entail, and the twenty thousand a year! Shares, real shares, 
are what they hunger and thirst for. While orthodox specu- 
lators sell their shares through their brokers, and at the 
market price, the bold dealers — no longer Spectres, but Stags — 
will sell their letters of allotment for fourpence, or anything, 
premium (so that it be current coin) per share. They per- 
sonate directors ; they get up impromptu provisional com- 
mittees in the tap-room of the Black Lion ; their references 
are bishops, Queen's counsel, fellows of the Boyal Society ; 
their substance sham shares in sham companies. For awhile 
they are attired in purple and fine linen ; they consume rich 
viands and choice wines in expensive taverns ; they drive 
high chariots, and prance on blood-horses. For six weeks 
they live at the rate of ten thousand a year : they ride the 
whirlwind of Fortune ! But after a storm comes rain ; and 
after a mania, a panic ! Then comes a run on the banking- 
houses ; consternation darkens Capel Court ; ruin is rampant 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 145 

on 'Change. And, as I speak, the old Ghosts come creeping 
hack to the old henches, and hegin listlessly to wait for the 
man so punctual in his unpunctuality. The hats are more 
crammed with papers, the rusty pocket-books more plethoric, 
the pockets more loaded, the button-holding talks are resumed 
as earnestly and as lengthily as ever ; yet the flesh and blood 
of Staghood have departed, and the figures crouching on 
'Change, and growling about Capel Court, are no longer men, 
but City Spectres. 



XIII. 

HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 



In the city of London, in two contiguous thoroughfares — the 
shabbiest, dingiest, poorest of their class — there are two 
Houses of Poverty. To the first, entrance is involuntary, 
and residence in it compulsory. You are brought there by a 
catchpole, and kept there under lock and key until your 
creditors are paid, or till you have suffered the purgatory of 
an Insolvent Court remand. This house is the Debtors' 
Prison of Whitecross Street. I know it. I have seen the 
mysteries of the Middlesex side, and have heard the lamenting 
in the Poultry Ward. Its stones have sermons ; but it was 
not to hear them that I travelled, one gloomy winter evening, 
Cripplegate Ward. My business in Whitecross Street was of 
no debtor or creditor nature ; for I was there to visit another 
house of poverty, the asylum of the Society for affording 
Nightly Shelter to the Houseless. 

Let me, in the first instance, state briefly what this Society 
professes to do. The manner in which it is done will form a 
subject for after-description. ' It is the peculiar object and 
principle of this charity ' (I quote the Keport), ' to afford 
nightly shelter and assistance to those who are really house- 
less and destitute during inclement winter seasons, and the 
occasional suspension of out-door work, in consequence of the 
rigour of the weather. To fulfil this intention, it is provided 
that an asylum shall be open and available at all hours of the 
night, without the need, on the part of the applicant, of a 
ticket, or any other passport or plea but his or her own state- 
ment of helpless necessity.' The relief afforded is limited to 
bread in a sufficient quantity to sustain nature^ warm shelter, . 

L 



146 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and the means of rest. Thus, little inducement is offered to 
those removed in the slightest degree from utter destitution, 
to avail themselves of the shelter for the sake of the food. 
But, in all cases of inanition or debility from exhaustion or 
fatigue, appropriate restoratives, such as gruel, wine, brandy, 
soup, and medicine, are administered under medical super- 
intendence. ' Many have been thus rescued,' says the Eeport, 
1 from the grasp of death.' 

I have two friends who do not approve of institutions on 
the principle stated above. My good friend Pragmos objects 
to them as useless. He proves to me by figures, by tables, 
by reports from perspicacious commissioners, that there is no 
need of any destitution in London ; and that, statistically, 
tabularly, honourable-boardically-speaking, there is no destitu- 
tion at all. How can there be any destitution with your out- 
door relief, and your in-door relief, your workhouse test, 
relieving officers, and your casual ward ? Besides, there is 
employment for all. There are hospitals and infirmaries for 
the sick, workhouse infirmaries for the infirm. Prosperity, 
the war notwithstanding, is continually increasing. None 
but the idle and the dissolute need be houseless and hungry. 
If they are, they have the union to apply to ; and, conse- 
quently, asylums for the houseless serve no beneficial end ; 
divert the stream of charitable donations from its legitimate 
channels ; foster idleness and vice, and parade, before the 
eyes of the public, a misery that does not exist. 

So far Pragmos. He is not hard-hearted ; but simply, 
calmly conscious (through faith in Arabic numerals, and in 
the Ninety-ninth Eeport of the Poor Law Commissioners) that 
destitution cannot be. But, he has scarcely finished quoting 
schedule D, when my other and sprightlier friend, Sharplynx, 
takes me to task, humorously, jocularly. He rallies me. 
* Destitution, my boy,' says Sharplynx, familiarly, ' gammon ! 
How can you, a shrewd man of the world ' (I blush), ' an old 
stager ' (I bow), ' be taken in by such transparent humbug ? 
Haven't you read the " Times?" Haven't you read the " Jolly 
Beggars ?" Did you never hear of cadgers, silver-beggars, 
shallow-coves ? Why, sir, that fellow in rags, with the imita- 
tion paralysis, who goes shivering along, will have veal for 
supper to-night : the kidney end of the loin, with stuffing, 
and a lemon squeezed over it. That woman on the door- 
step has hired the two puny children at fourpence a day; 
and she will have a pint and a half of gin before she goes to 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 147 

bed. That seemingly hectic fever flush is red paint ; those 
tremblings are counterfeit ; that quiet, hopeless, silent resig- 
nation is a dodge. Don't talk to me of being houseless and 
hungry! The impostors who pretend to be so, carouse in 
night cellars. They have turkey and sausages, roast pork, 
hot punch, paramours, packs of cards, and roaring songs. 
Houseless, indeed ! i'd give 'em a night's lodging — in the 
station-house, and send ? em to the treadmill in the morning.' 
Whereupon Sharplynx departs, muttering something about 
the good old times, and the stocks, and the whipping-post. 

So they go their separate ways — Pragmos and Sharplynx — 
yet I cannot blame either of them. It is but the old story of 
the many punished for the faults of a few. You, I, thousands 
are coerced, stinted in our enjoyments, comforts, amusements, 
liberties, rights, and are defamed and vilified as drunkards 
and ruffians, because one bull-necked, thick-lipped, scowling 
beast of a fellow drinks himself mad with alcohol, beats his 
wife, breaks windows, and roams about Drury Lane with a 
life-preserver. Thousands — whose only crime it is to have no 
money, no friends, no clothes, no place of refuge equal even 
to the holes that the foxes have in God's wide world — see the 
hand of charity closed, and the door of mercy shut, because 
Alice Grey is an impostor, and Bamfylde Moore Carew a cheat ; 
and because there have been such places as the Cour des 
Miracles, and Eats' Castle. - Go there and be merry, you 
rogue !' says Mr. Sharplynx, facetiously. So the destitute go 
into the streets, and die. They do .die, although you may 
continue talking and tabulating till Doomsday. I grant the 
workhouses, relieving officers, hospitals, infirmaries, station- 
houses, boards, minutes, and schedules, the Mendicity Society, 
and the Guildhall Solomons. But I stand with Galileo : 
Si muove ! and asseverate that, in the City paved with gold, 
there are people who are destitute, and die on door-steps, in 
the streets, on staircases, under dark arches, in ditches, and 
under the lees of walls. The police know it. Some day, 
perhaps, the Government will condescend to know it too, 
and instruct a gentleman at a thousand a year to see about it. 

Thinking of Pragmos and Sharplynx, I walked last Tuesday 
evening through Smithfield and up Barbican. It is a very 
dreary journey at the best of times ; but, on a raw February 
night — with the weather just hesitating between an iron frost 
and a drizzling thaw, and, not making up its mind on either 
subject, treating you to a touch of both alternately — the over- 
ly 2 



148 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

land route to Whitecross Street is simply wretched. The 
whole neighbourhood is pervaded with a miasma of grinding, 
unwholesome, sullen, and often vicious poverty. Everything 
is cheap and nasty, and the sellers seem as poor as the buyers. 
There are shops whose stock in trade is not worth half a 
dozen shillings. There are passers-by, the whole of whose 
apparel would certainly be dear at ninepence. Chandlers' 
shops, marine-stores, pawn-shops, and public-houses, occur 
over and over again in sickening repetition. There is a 
frowsy blight on the window-panes and the gas-lamps. The 
bread is all seconds ; the butchers'-shops, with their flaring 
gas-jets, expose nothing but scraps and bony pieces of meat. 
Inferior greengrocery in baskets chokes up the pathway ; but 
it looks so bad that it would be a pity to rescue it from its 
neighbour the gutter, and its legitimate proprietors the pigs. 
The air is tainted with exhalations from rank tobacco, stale 
herrings, old clothes, and workshops of noxious trades. The 
parish coffin passes you ; the policeman passes you, dull and 
dingy — quite another policeman compared to the smart 
A. 67. The raw night-breeze wafts to your ears oaths, 
and the crying of rotten merchandise, and the wailing of 
neglected children, and choruses of ribald songs. Every cab 
you see blocked up between a costermonger's barrow and a 
Pickford's van, appears to you to be conveying some miserable 
debtor to prison. 

Struggling, as well as I could, through all this squalid life, 
slipping on the greasy pavement, and often jostled off it, I 
came at last upon Whitecross Street, and dived (for that is 
about the only way you can enter it) into a forlorn, muddy, 
dimly-lighted thoroughfare, which was the bourne of my 
travels — Playhouse Yard. I have not Mr. Peter Cunning- 
ham at hand, and am not sufficient antiquary to tell when 
or whereabouts the playhouse existed in this sorry place. It 
is but a melancholy drama enacted here now, Heaven knows ! 

I was not long in finding out the Eefuge. About half-way 
up the yard hung out a lamp with a wire screen over it, and 
the name of the asylum painted upon it. I made my way to 
an open doorway, whence issued a stream of light ; and 
before which were ranged, in a widish semicircle, a crowd 
of cowering creatures, men, women, and children, who were 
patiently awaiting their turn of entrance. This was the door 
to the House of Poverty. 

I need not say that the object of my visit was promptly 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 149 

understood by those in authority, and that every facility was 
afforded me of seeing the simple system of relief at work. It 
was not much in a sight-seeing point of view, that the Society's 
officers had to show me. They had no pet prisoners ; no 
steam-cooking apparatus ; no luxurious baths ; no corrugated 
iron laundry; no vaulted passages, nor octagonal court-yards 
gleaming with whitewash and dazzling brass-work ; no ex- 
quisite cells fitted up with lavatories and cupboards, and con- 
veniences of the latest patent invention. Everything was, on 
the contrary, of the simplest and roughest nature ; yet every- 
thing seemed to me to answer admirably the purpose for 
which it was designed. 

I entered, first, an office, where there were some huge 
baskets filled with pieces of bread ; and where an official sat 
at a desk, registering, in a ledger, the applicants for admission 
as they presented themselves for examination at the half-door, 
or bar. They came up one by one, in alternate sexes, as 
they had been summoned from the semicircle outside. Now 
it was a young sailor-boy in a Guernsey frock ; now a travel- 
stained agricultural labourer; now a wan artisan; now a 
weary ragged woman with a troop of children ; now, most 
pitiable spectacle of all, some woe-begone, shrinking needle- 
woman — young, but a hundred years old in misery — comely, 
but absolutely seamed and scarred and macerated by famine. 
The answers were almost identical : They had come up from 
the country in search of work ; or they were London bred, 
and could not obtain work ; or the Union was full, and they 
could not get admission ; or they had no money ; or they had 
had nothing to eat ; or they did not know where else to go. 
All this was said not volubly ; not entreatingly ; and with 
no ejaculations or complaints, and with few additions ; but 
wearily, curtly, almost reluctantly. What had they to tell 
What beyond a name, a date, a place, was necessary to be 
extracted from them ? In their dismal attire, in their death- 
like voices, in their awful faces, there was mute eloquence 
enough to fill five hundred ledgers such as the one on the 
desk. I am no professed physiognomist. I believe I have 
sufficient knowledge of the street-world to tell a professional 
beggar from a starving man ; but I declare I saw no face that 
night passing the hatch but in which I could read : Eagged 
and Tired — Dead Beat — Utterly Destitute — Houseless and 
Hungry. The official took down each applicant's name, age, 
and birthplace; where he had slept the night before;- what 



9 



--^r— 



150 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

was his vocation ; what the cause of his coming there. The- 
ledger was divided into columns for the purpose. I looked 
over it. To the causes for application there was one unvary- 
ing answer — Destitution. In the ' Where slept the previous 
night ?' the answers ran : St. Luke's ; Whitechapel ; in the 
streets ; Stepney ; in the streets, in the streets, and in the 
streets again and again, till I grew sick. Many men are 
liars, we know; and among the five hundred destitute 
wretches that are nightly sheltered in this place there may 
be — I will not attempt to dispute it — a per-centage of im- 
postors ; a few whose own misconduct and improvidence 
have driven them to the wretchedest straits ; yet, I will back 
that grim ledger to contain some thousand more truths than 
are told in a whole library of Eeports of Parliamentary Com- 
mittees. 

There was a lull in the admissions, and I was inquiring 
about the Irish, when the official told the doorkeeper to ' call 
the first female.' By luck, the ' first female' was Irish her- 
self. She was a very little woman, with the smallest bonnet 
I ever saw. It was, positively, nothing more than a black 
patch on the back of her head, and the frayed ends were 
pulled desperately forward towards her chin, showing her 
ears through a ragged trellis-work. As to her dress, it looked 
as if some cunning spinner had manufactured a textile fabric 
out of mud ; or, as if dirt could be darned and patched. I 
did not see her feet ; but I heard a flapping on the floor as 
she moved, and guessed what sort of shoes she must have 
worn. She was the sort of little woman who ought to have 
had a round, rosy, dumpling face — and she had two bead- 
like black eyes ; but face and eyes were all crushed and 
battered by want and exposure. Her very skin was in rags. 
The poor little woman did nothing but make faces, which 
would have been ludicrous, if — in the connection of what 
surrounded and covered her, and her own valiant deter- 
mination not to cry — they had not been heartrending. Yes ; 
she was Irish (she said this apologetically) ; but, she had 
been a long time in Liverpool. Her husband had run away 
and left her. She had no children. She could have borne it 
better, she said, if she had. She had slept one night before 
in the ' Institution ' (she prided herself a little on this word, 
and used it pretty frequently), but she had been ashamed to 
come there again, and had slept one night in the workhouse 
and three nights in the streets. The superintendent spoke to 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 151 

her kindly, and told her she could be sheltered in the Befuge 
for a night or two longer ; and that then, the best thing she 
could do would be to make her way to Liverpool again. 
1 But I can't walk it, indeed,' cried the little woman ; ' I 
shall never be able to walk it. 0, dear ! 0, dear !' The 
valorously screwed-up face broke down all at once ; and, as 
she went away with her ticket, I heard her flapping feet and 
meek sobs echoing through the corridor. She did not press 
her story on us. She did not whine for sympathy. She 
seemed ashamed of her grief. Was this little woman a hum- 
bug, I wonder? 

A long lank man in black mud came up afterwards ; whose 
looks seemed fluttering between the unmistakeable * ragged 
and tired ' and an ominous ' ragged and desperate.' I shall 
never forget his hands as he held them across on the door- 
sill — long, emaciated, bony slices of integument and bone. 
They were just the hands a man might do some mischief to 
himself or some one else with, and be sorry for. I shall 
never forget, either, the rapt eager gaze with which he re- 
garded, almost devoured, the fire in the ofSce grate. He 
answered the questions addressed to him, as it were me- 
chanically, and without looking at his interlocutor ; Lis 
whole attention, wishes, thoughts, being centred in the blaz- 
ing coals. He seemed to hug himself in the prospective 
enjoyment of the warmth; to be greedy of it. Better the 
fire there, than the water of the dark cold river. I was not 
sorry when he received his ticket ; and, looking over his 
shoulder at the fire, went shuffling away. He frightened me. 

I was informed by the superintendent (a frank-spoken 
military man, who had lost a leg in the Caffre war), that, as a 
rule, the duration of the shelter extended by the Society is 
limited to three nights to Londoners, and to seven nights to 
country people. In special cases, however, special excep- 
tions are made ; and every disposition is shown to strain a 
point in favour of those weary wanderers, and to bear with 
them, as far as is consistent with justice to others. A ration 
of eight ounces of bread is given to each admitted person on 
entrance, another ration when they leave between eight and 
nine the next morning. 

Accompanied by the secretary and the superintendent, I 
was now shown the dormitories. We visited the men's side 
first. Passing a range of lavatories, where each inmate is 
required to wash his face, neck, and arms — hot water being 



152 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

provided for the purpose — we ascended a wooden staircase, 
and came into a range of long, lofty, barn-like rooms, divided 
into sections by wooden pillars. An immense stove was in 
the centre, fenced in with stakes ; and, in its lurid hospitable 
light, I could fancy the man in black and some score more 
brothers in misery, greedily basking. Hanged on either side 
were long rows of bed-places, trough-like, grave-like, each 
holding one sleeper. In the early days of the Society (it has 
been in existence for more than thirty years) the inmates 
slept on straw ; but, as this was found to possess many draw- 
backs to health, cleanliness, and to offer danger from fire, 
mattresses stuffed with hay and covered with waterproofing, 
which can be washed and aired with facility, have been sub- 
stituted. Instead of blankets, which harbour vermin and are 
besides less durable, there are ample coverlets of Basil lea- 
ther, warm and substantial. With these ; with the ration of 
bread; with genial warmth, the objects sought for are at- 
tained. It is not an hotel that is required. The slightest 
modicum of luxury would corroborate Pragmos, and be an 
encouragement to the worthless, the idle, and the depraved. 
The Eefuge competes with no lodging-house, no thieves' 
kitchen, no tramps' boozing-cellar ; but it is a place for a 
dire corporeal necessity to be ministered to, by the simplest 
corporeal requisites. A roof to shelter, a bed to lie on, a 
fire to warm, a crust to eat — these are offered to those who 
have literally nothing. 

By the flickering gas, which is kept burning all night, I 
stood with my back to one of the wooden pillars, and looked 
at this sad scene. The bed-places were rapidly filling. 
Many of the tired-out wayfarers had already sunk into sleep ; 
others were sitting up in bed mending their poor rags ; many 
lay awake, but perfectly mute and quiescent. As far as the 
eye could reach, almost, there were more ranges of troughs, 
more reclining heaps of rags. I shifted my position ner- 
vously as I found myself within range, wherever I turned, of 
innumerable eyes, — eyes calm, fixed, brooding, hopeless. 
Who has not had this feeling, while walking through an 
hospital, a lunatic asylum, a prison ? The eyes are upon you, 
you know, gazing sternly, moodily, reproachfully. You feel 
almost as if you were an intruder. You are not the doctor to 
heal, the priest to console, the Lady Bountiful to relieve. 
What right have you to be there, taking stock of human 
miseries, and jotting down sighs and tears in your note-book? 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 153 

I found the surgeon at a desk by the fire. He had just 
been called in to a bad case ; one that happened pretty fre- 
quently, though. The miserable case was just being sup- 
ported from a bench to his bed. He had come in, and had 
been taken very ill ; not with cholera, or fever, or dysentery, 
but with the disease — my friend, Sharplynx, won't believe in 
— Starvation. He was simply at death's door with inanition 
and exhaustion. Drunk with hunger, surfeited with cold, 
faint with fatigue. He did not require amputation nor cup- 
ping, quinine, colchicum, nor sarsaparilla ; he merely wanted 
a little brandy and gruel, some warmth, some supper, and a 
bed. The cost price of all these did not probably amount to 
more than sixpence ; yet, curiously, for want of that six- 
pennyworth of nutriment and rest, there might have been a 
bill on the police-station door to-morrow, beginning, ' Dead 
Body Found.' 

I asked the surgeon if such cases occurred often. They 
did, he said : TVhether they ever ended fatally ? Occasion- 
ally. Only the other night a man was brought in by a police 
sergeant, who had found him being quietly starved to death 
behind a cart. He was a tall, athletic-looking man enough, 
and was very sick. While the sergeant was stating his case, 
he suddenly fell forward on the floor — dead ! He was not 
diseased, only starved. 

Seeking for information as to the general demeanour of the 
inmates, I was told that good conduct was the rule, disorderly 
or refractory proceedings the exception. ' If you were here 
at eight o'clock, sir,' said the superintendent (it was now 
half-past seven), ' you wouldn't hear a pin drop. Poor crea- 
tures ! they are too tired to make a disturbance. The boys, 
to be sure, have a little chat to themselves ; but they are 
easily quieted. When, once in a way, we have a disorderly 
character, we turn him out, and there is an end of it.' I was 
told, moreover, that almost anything could be done with this 
motley colony by kind and temperate language, and that they 
expressed, and appeared to feel, sincere gratitude for the 
succour afforded to them. They seldom made friends among 
their companions, the superintendent said. They came, and 
ate, and warmed themselves, and went on their way in the 
morning, alone. There is a depth of misery too great for 
companionship. 

Touching the boys, those juveniles were relegated to a j)lan- 
tation of troughs by themselves, where they were plunging 



154 GASLIGHT AKD DAYLIGHT. 

and tumbling about in the usual manner of town-nursed 
Bedouins. I learnt that the Institution— to use a familiar 
expression — rather fought shy of boys. Boys are inclined to 
be troublesome ; and, whenever it is practicable, they are 
sent to the ragged-school dormitaries, where, my guide said, 
' they make them go to school before they go to bed, 
which they don't like at all.' More than this, some parents, 
to save themselves the trouble of providing supper and bed- 
ding for their children, will send one or more of them to 
the Eefuge ; and, where space is so vitally valuable, the in- 
troduction of even one interloper is a thing to be carefully 
prevented. 

The Eefuge is open after five in the evening, and a porter 
is on duty all night for the admission of urgent cases. The 
fires and gas are also kept burning throughout the night, and 
a male and female superintendent sit up, in case of need. 
Those who have been in the Eefuge on Saturday night, have 
the privilege of remaining in the Institution during the whole 
of Sunday. They have an extra ration of bread and three 
ounces of cheese, and divine service is performed in the 
morning and afternoon. There are many Sabbaths kept in 
London : the Vinegar Sabbath, the Velvet and Satin Sabbath, 
the Eed Hot Poker Sabbath, the carriage-and-pair Sabbath, 
the gloomily-lazy Sabbath, the pipe-and-pot Sabbath ; but I 
doubt if any can equal the Sabbath passed in this wretched 
Playhouse Yard, as a true Sabbath of rest, and peace, and 
mercy. 

We went up, after this, to the women's wards. The arrange- 
ments were identical with those of the men ; save, that one 
room is devoted to women with families, where the partitions 
between the troughs had been taken away that the children 
might lie with their mothers. We passed between the ranges 
of bed-places ; noticing that the same mournful, weary, wake- 
ful silence, was almost invariable, though not, I was told, 
compulsory. The only prohibition — and safety requires this 
— is against smoking. Now and then, a gaunt girl, with her 
black hair hanging about her face, would rise up in her bed 
to stare at us ; now and then, some tattered form amongst those 
who were sitting there till the ward below was ready for 
their reception, would rise from the bench and drop us a 
curtsey ; but the general stillness was pervading and unvary- 
ing. A comely matron bustled about noiselessly with her 
assistant, who was a strange figure among all these rags, 



HOUSELESS AND HUNGRY. 155 

being a pretty girl in ringlets and ribbons. One seemed to 
have forgotten, here, that such a being could be in existence. 
I spoke to some of the women on the benches. It was the 
same old story. Needle-work at miserable prices, inability 
to pay the two-penny rent of a lodging, no friends, utter 
destitution ; this, or death. There were a few — and this 
class I heard was daily increasing — who were the wives of 
soldiers in the Militia, or of men in the Land Transport and 
Army Works Corps. Their husbands had been ordered away ;* 
they had no claim upon the regular Military Relief Associa- 
tion, they had received no portion of their husbands'- pay— 
and they were houseless and hungry. 

I stopped long to look down into the room where the women 
and children were. There they lay, God help them ! head to 
heel, transversely, anyhow for warmth ; nestling, crouching 
under the coverlets ; at times feebly wailing. Looking down 
upon this solemn, silent, awful scene made you shudder; 
made you question by what right you were standing up, 
warm, prosperous, well-fed, well-clad, with these destitute 
creatures, your brothers and sisters, who had no better food 
and lodging than this ? But for the absence of marble floors 
and tanks, the place might be some kennel for hounds ; but 
for the rags and the eyes, these might be sheep in the pens 
in Smithfield Market. 

I went down stairs at last ; for there was no more to see. 
Conversing further with the secretary, I gleaned that the 
average number of destitute persons admitted nightly is five 
hundred and iiftj; but that as many as six hundred have 
been accommodated. Looking at the balance-sheet of the 
Society, I found the total expense of the asylum (exclusive 
of rent) was less than one thousand pounds. 

A thousand pounds ! we blow it away in gunpowder ; we 
spend it upon diplomatic fools' caps ; we give it e^erj month 
in the year to right honourable noblemen for doing nothing, 
or for spoiling what ordinary men of business would do 
better. A thousand pounds ! It would not pay a deputy- 
sergeant-at-arms ; it would scarcely be a retiring pension for 
an assistant prothonotary. A thousand pounds ! Deputy- 
chaff- wax would have spurned it, if offered as compensation 
for loss of office. A thousand pounds ! the sum jarred upon 
my ear, as I walked back through Smithfield. At least, for 

* This paper was written during the Crimean war-time. 



156 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

their ten hundred pounds, the Society for Sheltering the 
Houseless save some hundred of human lives a year. 

I abide by the assertion, that men and women die nightly 
in our golden streets, because they have no bread to put into 
their miserable mouths, no roofs to shelter their wretched 
heads. It is no less a God-known, man-neglected fact, that in 
any state of society in which such things can be, there must 
be something essentially bad and rotten. 



XIV. 

THE SECRETS OF THE GAS. 



The Gas has its "secrets, and I happen to know them. The 
Gas has a voice, and I can hear it — a voice beyond the rush- 
ing whistle in the pipe, and the dull buzzing flare in the 
burner. It speaks, actively, to men and women of what is, 
and of what is done and suffered by night and by day ; and 
though it often crieth like Wisdom in the streets and no 
man regardeth it, there are, and shall be some to listen 
to its experiences, hearken to its counsels, and profit by its 
lessons. 

I know the secrets of the gas, but not all of them. Some 
secrets it has, which are hidden by land, and stream, and sea 
— by accident, position, and authority — even from my sight, 
but not from my ken. The gas has its secrets in palaces, on 
whose trebly-piled carpets my plebeian feet can never tread. 
It may be burning now,* to the heavy blow and great dis- 
couragement of bearded and sheep-skinned purveyors of 
tallow and lamp-oil — burning in an Ural gilt candelabrum, 
chastely decorated with double eagles in the den — the private 
cabinet, I mean — of some grim bear or autocrat, who lies not 
amidst bones and blood, far away with the weeds and shells 
at the bottom of the Inner Sea, but lies amidst protocols and 
diplomatic notes — unlighted fusees to the shells of destruction. 
That gas may be shining on minims and breves of Te Deums, 
fresh scored and annotated in appropriate red ink— to be sung 
by all orthodox believers, when the heretical fleets of the 
West shall have followed the Moslem three-deckers to their 
grave in Sinope Bay. That gas may be flickering now — who 

* Temp. Bell. Taurid. Scrip. 



THE SECEETS OF THE GAS. 157 

knows ? — in the lambent eyes of some tyrant as lie peers 
greedily over the map of Europe, and settles in his own mind 
where in England this Off shall eat his first candle, or where 
in France that Owsky shall apply the knout. Permeating in 

pipes beneath the well-drilled feet of thousands of orthodox 

serfs, this same gas may be glimmering in the lamps of the 
Nevshoi Prospekt, and twinkling in the bureau of the Director 
of Secret Police as he prepares pass-tickets for Siberia, or 
cancels them for bribes of greasy rouble notes : it may be 
glowering at the Moscow railway station, as thousands of 
human hundred-weight of great-coated food for powder, leave 
by late or early trains for the frontier : it may be illumining 
the scared and haggard face of the incendiary when, on the 
map he is scanning, the names of the countries he lusts to 
seize, turn to letters of blood and dust, and tell him (as the 
handwriting told Belshazzar) that the Modes and Persians 
are at his gate, and that his kingdom is given to another. I 
say, this gas. with the glowing charcoal in the stove, and the 
ceremonial wax candles on the malachite mantelpiece, mav be 
the only spectator of the rage in his eyes, and the despair 
in his heart, and the madness in his brain. Though, perhaps, 
he bums no gas in his private cabinet after all. and adheres to 
the same orthodox tallow fat and train oil. by the light of 
which Peter plied his adze, Catherine plundered Poland, Paul 
was strangled, and Alexander was poisoned ! 

The gas may have its secrets unknown to me ('now that 
English engineering has been favoured with the high privi- 
lege of illumining the Eternal City), in the strong casemates 
of the Castle of St. Angelo. Yes. may derive deeper shadows 
from it : and it may light up tawny parchments with heavy 
seals, which attest that the Holy Office is yet a little more 
than a name. There is gas in Venice : every tourist has had 
his passport examined by its light : and who shall say that 
the gas has not its secrets in the Palace of the Doges : that it 
burns not in gloomy corridor, and on stone winding staircase, 
lighting some imperial gaoler in his tour of inspection : or 
that by its unpitying light some wretched prisoner who has 
dared to violate the imperio-regal Lombardo- Venetian edicts 
by thinking, or sj)eaking. or writing, in the manner of one who 
walks on two legs instead of four, is not brought forth to have 
some state secret ('which he knows nothing of) extorted from 
him by the imperial and royal stick. Eoyal Neapolitan gene- 
rosity may yet permit some streaks of prison gas to penetrate 



158 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

into the Sicilian dens where gentlemen are chained to felons, 
to show them the brightness of their fetters, and the filthiness 
of the floor, and the shadow of the sentry's bayonet through 
the heavy bars outside. Mighty secrets, dread secrets, dead 
secrets, may the gas have, abroad and at home. Strange 
stories could the dark lantern of old have told — the lantern 
by the light of which Fawkes laid his train, and D'Enghien 
was led into the ditch of Vincennes to be shot, and Pichegru 
was murdered, and Fletcher Christian whispered with John 
Adams ; but the light of the lantern pales before the mystery 
of the gas. The gas saw the blood that was brought from the 
shambles and smeared over the pavement of the Paris Boule- 
vards — the blood on which, next day, the dynasty of Orleans 
stumbled and came headlong down to ruin and death. The 
gas shone broadly, brightly, in hall and corridor and ante- 
chamber of the Elysee on the eve of the second of December. 
It penetrated into an inner chamber where one silent man 
sat, his feet on the fender, smoking a cigar, who to fears and 
questions, and remonstrances, and doubts, and counsels, had 
but this one answer, ' Qu'on execute mes ordres P The same 
gas saw those orders obeyed as the stealthy hackney-coaches 
went about with the stealthier Commissaries of Police^ to 
kidnap the representatives and generals. I remember passing 
the Palace of the Elysees on the night of the third of Decem- 
ber, and seeing the courtyard and windows of this palace of 
successful power, one blaze of gas — blazing on the green 
liveries of the lacqueys, and the uniforms of the aides-de- 
camp, and the hands and faces of the soldiers hardly yet 
cleansed from blood and gunpowder. What secrets that gas 
of the Eue St. Honore — the same starting from the pert little 
Cupids quivering in the bonnet-shop opposite — must have 
been a trusty listener to, within those three December nights ! 
If any man doubt the secrets of the gas, not only abroad but 
at home — not only supposititious and probable but actual — 
let him remember that recent miserable inquiry into the 
cruelties and tyrannies of some of our vaunted philanthropy- 
purified English gaols. Let him remember among the list of 
wretches tied to walls, and strapped to railings, and whipped, 
and half throttled with collars, let him remember those who 
—as the official memorandum ran — were to be ' deprived of 
their bed and gas.' Bless you, the gas heard all these things 
while the good Birmingham people (may there never be 
w.orse people in England ! ) slept soundly. The gas knew how 



THE SECRETS OF THE GAS. 159 

| many turns of the crank prisoner No. 50 was short ; of how 
many meals 51 had been mulcted ; how many lashes epi- 
leptic 52 was to receive ; how often 54 was to be deprived of 
his bed and gas ! 

As I walk about the streets by night, endless and always 
suggestive intercommunings take place between me and the 
trusty, silent, ever-watchful gas, whose secrets I know. In 
broad long streets where the vista of lamps stretches far far 
away into almost endless perspective ; in courts and alleys, 
dark by day but lighted up at night by this incorruptible 
tell-tale ; on the bridges ; in the deserted parks ; on wharfs 
and quays; in dreary suburban roads; in the halls of public 
buildings ; in the windows of late-hour-keeping houses and 
offices, there is my gas — bright, silent, and secret. Gas to 
teach me ; gas to counsel me ; gas to guide my footsteps, not 
over London flags, but through the crooked ways of unseen 
life and death, of the doings of the great Unknown, of the 
cries of the great Unheard. He who will bend himself to 
listen to, and avail himself, of these crets of the gas, may walk 
through London streets proud in the consciousness of being 
an Inspector — in the great police force of philosophy — and of 
carrying a perpetual bull's-eye in his belt. Like his muni- 
cipal brother, he may perambulate the one-half world, while 

* Nature seems dark, and wicked dreams abuse 
The eurtain'd sleep.' 

Not a bolt or bar, not a lock or fastening, not a houseless 
night-wanderer, not a homeless dog, shall escape that search- 
ing ray of light which the gas shall lend him, to see and to 
know. 

The gas on the river. Has it no secrets to tell there ? On 
bridge after bridge, the long rows of lamps mirror themselves 
in the dark, still pool of the silent highway, and penetrate 
like arrows into the bosom secrets of the Thames. The gas 
knows of the ancient logs of timber, It — and Wisdom — only 
know how many centuries old, strong and seasoned in their 
gray rottenness, the logs which the bargemen and lightermen of 
Erith and G-reenhithe bring home for fuel, or for garden-fences, 
and which, for aught we know, may have been in dead ages 
remnants of Danish ships, of Eoman galleys, of the primitive 
skiffs of the old Britons, maybe. Down beneath, where the 
glittering arrow of the gas points, there may be shields, and 
arrows, and collars of barbaric gold. There may be the 



Ir30 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

drinking-eup of Vortigern, the crown of Canute, the golden 
bracelets that Alfred hung up on the highways, the rings of 
Boman knights, and the swords of the Consuls, the amulets 
of the Druids, and the jewels of the Saxon kings. The gas 
knows of shoals which the cunningest harbour-masters, the 
best conservators of the river, and the mightiest hydrographers, 
cannot point out. The gas knows the weak points of the 
tunnel ; and where the waters broke in years ago, and where 
they may break in again. Down where the gas points, may 
be the bones of men and women drowned before our great 
grandsires were born. There, may be Henry the Fourth, 
flung coffin and all from the boat in which his remains were 
being conveyed for sepulture. There, may be sailors slain in 
sudden broils on board ship, and flung into the river. There, 
may be bodies of men murdered by river pirates, plundered 
by longshore-men and lighthouse-men, and thrown from boats 
with heavy weights tied to them, into the pit where the water 
and the gas tell no tales. There, may be mangled corpses 
brought by assassins on horseback, as Csesar Borgia brought 
his brother the Duke of Gandia, to the Tiber, and thrown 
into the dull plashing stream, with stones in their cloaks to 
make them sink. There, may be dead men, drowned in step- 
ping from one ship to another, or who have slipped off planks, 
drunk, or fallen from mast-heads, or who have leaped into the 
river to escape press-gangs, or robbers, or river policemen. 
There, may be ' run ' cargoes of contraband goods, tobacco, 
fiery spirits, rich silk or delicate lace ; there, may be bales of 
goods plundered by fresh-water thieves from foreign ships, 
and sunk by bullets and iron weights until the time shall 
serve for fishing them up again. There, may be the suicide 
of yesterday ; the wayward boy, once the pride and hope of 
the family ; the girl, once loved and prized ; the ruined 
spendthrift ; the hopeless bankrupt ; the desperate man, 
driven by an intolerable misery and utter hunger and naked- 
ness, to cast himself into these jaws of death as into a bed of 
slumber and soft repose. Oh you gas upon the bridges ! 
liow many times have the garments of forlorn women gleamed 
in your unpitying light as they flung themselves from the 
high parapet into the abyss beneath. Oh you gas ! how 
many sighs and prayers and words of despairing farewell ! 
There was a shriek, a plunge, a plash, the vertical reflection 
of the gas was for a moment broken into zigzag sparkles by a 
body combating with the remorseless river. Then, the 



THE SECRETS OF THE GAS. 161 

waters of death went over the head of mortality, and ail was 
still and all was over. Gas! Where are they now? The 

hope of the family, the focus of tender love, and anxious care, 
and fond aspirations. The advertisements which entreat 
them to return are yet in the * Times ;' the bills which describe 
their appearance are yet on the walls ; the watchers at home 
are waiting ; the river men are out with drags ; but the water 
holds them fast, and the gas shines secretly above them, and 
they shall no more appear in the comeliness of life and love. 
If we ever hear of these. Gas ! it will be, at best, at the 
grim dead-house by the waterside, and their only epitaph will 
be the awful placard on the wall of the Police Station, ' Dead 
body found.' 

Fast does the gas keep the secrets of the river, They can- 
not escajDe. The janitor gas-lamps guard either side. They 
watch over long lines of docks, and see that no light, save their 
own. appear about gaunt-masted ships, and strong briekeii 
warehouses where the old wines ooze into toping casks, and 
muddle them with vinous fumes : where the sawdust is purpled 
with emptied glasses; where the spiral threads which the 
coopers' gimlet has made, dance ; where the great wreaths of 
cobwebs hang lazily from the roof as if quite gone in liquor 
and overcome with the tasting-orders of years : where floors 
A and B, and cellarages C and D, are pungent with pepper 
and tobacco, and fragrant with coffee and spices, and sickly 
with oranges and grapes, and sticky with figs and muscovado 
and molasses, and aromatic with crisp teas and chicory and 
pemmican, and ammoniacally nauseous with horns and hoofs 
and untanned skins and guano, and oleaginous with tallow and 
palm-oil. and hive-smelling with bees'-wax, and drowsy and 
vapid with huge chests of opium, packed by Turkish rayalis 
or Hindoo ryots, and in its black flabby cakes concentrating 
Heaven knows how much madness, and misery, and death, 
strangely mingled with soothing relief from pain and with 
sparkling gaiety. The gas hems in the stealthy dockyard 
watchman going his rounds, the beetle-browed convict in the 
dismantled grated -polled hulks, the swift galleys of the Thames 
Police, the moaning sufferers in the Dreadnought hospital-ship : 
the gas throws into skeleton relief the ribs and timbers of half- 
demolished ships, the stripped and spectral hulks of condemned 
and broken-up vessels rotting in the mud. The gas twinkles on 
the trellised panes of the Gothic windows in the great Parlia- 
ment Houses, and listens slily to the late debates. The gas 

3i 



162 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

feebly illumines the blackened coal-barges and lighters, full of 
bricks and huge paving-stones. It shines at the end of the 
landing stages, and at the feet of the slimy river stairs, upon 
moored wherries and river steam-boats so bustling and busy 
by day, so hushed and quiet by night. The gas gleams on the 
time-worn bastions of the Tower ; the gas knows the secrets 
of the honeycombed old cannon better than do their tompions ; 
the gas knows the password and the countersign ; the gas is 
aware of the slow-pacing sentinel ; the gas mirrors itself in the 
darkling stream which gurgles about the heavy timber barri- 
cades, with which the better feeling of the age has blocked up 
the Traitor's gate. The gas is too young to relate to you the 
secrets of the Tower in days gone by. It lighted not Elizabeth 
climbing the slimy stairs, and sitting down defiant of her 
gaolers, at the top ; it has no knowledge of Jane Grey creeping 
to her doom ; it has not seen the furtive wherries with the 
warders and halberdiers in the stern, and the prisoners in the 
midst, rowing towards the gate of death. It has not seen the 
courtly mien of Surrey ; the gallant grey hairs, the toil and 
travel and trouble furrowed, but yet handsome face of Ealeigh ; 
the fierce white locks of the Countess of Pembroke ; the sneers 
and sarcasms and wicked wrinkles of Simon Lord Lovat ; the 
blue eyes and gentle smile of Derwentwater ; the stern heroism 
of Charles Eadcliffe ; the crazy fanaticism of George Gordon ; 
the Spa Fields and Cato Street enthusiasm of the poor feeble 
traitor Thistlewood. The Tower gas knows not where the 
posts of the scaffold stood, or how many stones have been be- 
dewed with blood. It cannot point out the spot where the 
ghost of Ann Bullen was said to walk. It lighted not to their 
work Dighton and Forrest creeping to murder the princes. 
It shone not on the brazen countenance of the King-honoured 
Blood, as, arrayed in sham canonicals, he compassed the 
plunder of the crown. The gas knows not where Jane saw 
the headless body of her husband, or how much good, and gentle, 
and pious, as well as guilty and ambitious, dust moulders 
beneath the chancel flags of the little church of Saint Peter and 
Vincula. Yet has the Tower gas seen the hideous range of 
brick armouries built by the third William, with their tens of 
thousands of swords and bayonets and muniments of war, 
blazing up into one grand conflagration, and driving it, potent 
gas as it is, into obscurity for a time. It has seen the slow but 
absorbing footstep of the blessed by-gone years of peace dis- 
mantle ramparts and brick up portcullises, and rust the mouths 



PERFIDIOUS PATMOS. 1G3 

of the howling dogs of war and fill up the month. Its mission 
is more peaceful now. It glistens on the gold and crimson of 
the warders as the ceremony of delivering the Queen's keys is 
nightly performed. It winks at the spruce young Guardsmen 
officers as they dash up to the gates in Hansom cabs just before 
shutting-up time, or saunter jauntily to mess. It lights up the 
clean pots and glasses in the stone kitchen, and glows upon the 
rubicund countenances of thirsty grenadiers. It has an eye — 
a silent, watchful eye — upon a certain strong room where there 
is a great cage, and in that cage scintillating the precious 
stones of the Imperial Crown of England, the gold and silver 
and jewels of the sceptre, the orb, the ampulla, the great salt- 
cellar, and all the stately regalia. The gas is a guardian of all 
these, and defies the Colonel Bloods of '59. (Oh dege- 
nerate '59, where are the good old Bloods, and where the 
good old monarchs who were so fond of them ?) An im- 
partial gas, it shines as brightly on the grenadier's quart-pot 
as on the queenly crown. A convivial gas, it blazes cheerfully 
in the mess room of the Beauchamp Tower. A secretive gas, 
it knows that beneath the curtains and flags of that same mess- 
room there are dark words and inscriptions cut into the aged 
wall — the records of agony and hopeless captivity, anagrams 
of pain, emblems of sorrow and hopes fled and youth and joy 
departed. 

So, from where the town begins to where it ends ; from the 
twinkling lights of Putney and Kew, to the marshy flats below 
Deptford ; the gas shines through the still night, and is the 
repository of secrets known to few, but which all who choose 
to make the gas their friend, may read, to the softening of their 
hearts, perhaps, even as they run. 



XV. 

PERFIDIOUS PATMOS. 



The natural place of refuge for a hunted man is an island. 
None but those who have known what it is to be pursued 
from place to place, who have been aware of such and such 
blood-hounds upon their track, of such and such scouts wait- 
ing at given points to lead them down to death or captivity, 
can form an idea of the feeling of security engendered by the 
knowledge that there is between them and their enemies 

m 2 



164 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

a bulwark far more impregnable than any gabion, glacis, 
bastion, or counterscarp, that Vauban ever dreamed of, in the 
shape of a ring of blue water. So islands have been, in all 
ages and circumstances, the chosen places of refuge to men 
who could find no rest elsewhere for the soles of their feet. 
Patmos was the elected asylum of St. John the Apostle. In 
Malta, the last Christian knights of Palestine, driven from 
their first island refuge- — Ehodes — found a haven of safety, 
and founded a city of strength against the infidels. The 
expiring embers of the Druidical priesthood smouldered 
away in the impenetrable groves of the island of Anglesey. 
The isles of Greece were the eyries of poetry, and art, and 
liberty, when the mainland groaned beneath the despotism of 
the thirty tyrants. The Greeks located their paradise in the 
islands of the blest. Madeira spread forth pitying, protecting 
arms to two fugitive lovers. Charles Edward hid in Skye. 
Once within the pleasant valleys of Pitcairn's Island, Jack 
Adams and the mutineers of the c Bounty ? felt secure and safe 
from courts-martial and yard-arms. There is a hiding-place 
for the pursued of sheriffs in the island of Jersey and in the 
Isle of Man ; in which latter insular refuge, Charlotte de la 
Tremouille, Countess of Derby, sheltered the last remnants of 
the cause of the Stuarts against Oliver Cromwell. The dogs of 
Constantinople found protection from the sticks and stones of 
the men of Stamboul, in an island in the Bosphorus. The 
last of the London marshes staunchly defy drainage from the 
strongholds of the Isle of Dogs ; and there is a wall of strength 
for the choicest London fevers, and the dirtiest London 
lodging-houses, against Inspectors Eeason and Humanity and 
their whole force, in and about the mud embankments of 
Jacob's Island. 

But, chief and pre-elect of islands on which camps of 
refuge have been built, is the one we are happy enough to 
live in, the Island of England. There are other islands in 
the world, far more isolated, geographically speaking, far 
more distant from hostile continents, far more remote from 
the shores of despotism. Yet to these chalky cliffs of Albion, 
to this Eefuge, misnamed the perfidious, come refugees from 
all quarters of the world, and of characters, antecedents, and 
opinions, pointing to every quarter of the political compass. 
The oppressor and the oppressed, the absolutist and the 
patriot, the butcher and the victim, the wolf and the lamb, 
the legitimist as white as snow, and the montagnard as red as 



PERFIDIOUS PATM< W3. 165 

d. the d 8 and the socialist — men of views so dis- 

similar that they would (and do) tear each other to pieces in 

their own lands, find a common refuge in this country, and 
live in common harmony here. The very climate seems to 
have a soothing and mollifying influence on the most savage 
foreign natures. South American dictators, who have shot. 
slaughtered, and outraged hecatombs of their countrymen in 
the parehed-up plains of Buenos Ayres and Montevideo, roar 
you as mildly as any sucking dove- as soon as they are in the 
Southampton Water — make pets of their physicians, and give 
their barbers silver shaving-dishes : pachas of three tails. 
terrible fellows for bowstringing, impaling, and bastinadoing 
in their Asiatic dominions, here caper nimbly in ladies' 
chambers to the twangling of lutes ; hangers of men and 
scourgers of women forego blood-thirstiness : demagogues 
forget to howl for heads : and red republicans, who were as 
roaring lions in the lands they came from, submit to have 
their claws cut. and their manes trimmed, drink penny cups 
of coffee, and deliver pacific lectures in Mechanics 3 Insti- 
tutes. 

England, then, is the Patmos of foreign fugitives — a collec- 
tion of Patmoses. rather: almost every seaport and provincial 
town of any note having a little inland island of refuge of its 
own ; but London being the great champ (FasUe z the monster 
isle of safety, a Cave of Adullam for the whole world. It is 
with this Patmos that I have principally to do. 

Years ago. Doctor Johnson called London 'the common 
sewer of Paris and of Borne :' but at the present day it is a 
reservoir, a giant vat. into which flow countless streams of 
continental immigration. More so than Paris, where the 
English only go for pleasure : the Germans to become tailors 
and boot-makers: and the Swiss, valets, house-porters, and 
waiters. More so than the United States, whose only con- 
siderable feed-pipes of emigration are Irish. English, and 
Germans. There is in London the foreign artistic population, 
among which I will comprise French, and Swiss, and German 
governesses. French painters, actors, singers, and cooks : 
Italian singers and musicians : French hairdressers, milliners. 
dressmakers, clear-starchers. and professors of legerdemain. 
with countless teachers of every known language, and pro- 
fessors of every imaginable musical instrument. There is 
the immense foreign servile population : French and Italian 
valets and shopmen, and German nurses and nursery-maids. 



166 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

There is the foreign commercial population, a whole colony of 
Greek merchants in Finsbury, of Germans in the Minories, of 
Frenchmen round Austin Friars, of Moorish Jews in White- 
chapel, and of foreign shopkeepers at the west end of the 
town, There is the foreign mechanical, or labouring popula- 
tion : French, Swiss, and German watchmakers, French and 
German lithographers, Italian plaster-cast makers and German 
sugar-bakers, brewers, and leather-dressers. There is the 
foreign mendicant population : German and Alsatian buy-a- 
broom girls, Italian hurdy-gurdy grinders, French begging- 
letter writers (of whose astonishing numbers, those good 
associations, ' La Societe Frangaise de Bienfaisance a Londres, 
and ' The Friends of Foreigners in Distress,' could tell some 
curious tales, maybe), Lascar street-sweepers, and tom-tom 
pounders. There is the foreign maritime population : an 
enormous one, as all men who have seen Jack alive in London 
can vouch for. There is the foreign respectable population, 
composed of strangers well to do, who prefer English living 
and English customs to those. of their own country. There is 
the foreign swindling population : aliens who live on their 
own wits and on the want thereof in their neighbours : sham 
counts, barons, and chevaliers ; farmers of German lotteries, 
speculators in German university degrees, forgers of Eussian 
bank-notes, bonnets at gaming-houses, touts and spungers to 
foreign hotels and on foreign visitors, bilkers of English 
taverns and boarding-houses, and getters-up of fictitious con- 
certs and exhibitions. There is the foreign visiting or sight- 
seeing population, who come from Dover to the Hotel de 
l'Europe, and go from thence, with a cicerone, to St. Paul's, 
Windsor, and Eichmond, and thence back again to France, 
Germany, or Spain. Lastly, there is the refugee population ; 
and this be mine to descant upon. 

The Patmos of London I may describe as an island bounded 
by four squares ; on the north by that of Soho, on the south 
by that of Leicester, on the east by the quadrangle of Lincoln's 
Inn Fields (for the purlieus of Long Acre and Seven Dials 
are all Patmos), and on the west by Golden Square. 

The trapezium of streets enclosed within this boundary are 
not, by any means, of an aristocratic description. A maze of 
sorry thoroughfares, a second-rate butcher's meat and vege- 
table market, two model lodging-houses, a dingy parish 
church, and some ' brick barns ' of dissent are within its 
boundaries. No lords or squires of high degree live in this 



PERFIDIOUS PATMOS. 1G7 

political Alsatia. The houses are distinguished by a plurality 
of bell-pulls inserted in the door-jambs, and by a plurality of 
little brass name-plates, bearing the names of in-dwelling 
artisans. Everybody (of nubile age and English extraction) 
seems to be married, and to have a great many children, 
whose education appears to be conducted chiefly on the out- 
door principle. 

As an uninterested stranger, and without a guide, you 
might, perambulating these shabby streets, see in them 
nothing which would peculiarly distinguish them from that 
class of London veins known inelegantly, but expressively, 
as * back slums/ At the first glance you see nothing but 
dingy houses teeming with that sallow, cabbage-stalk, and 
fried fish sort of population, indigenous to back slums. The 
pinafored children are squabbling or playing in the gutters ; 
while from distant courts come faintly and fitfully threats 
of Jane to tell Ann's mother ; together with that unmean- 
ing monotonous chant or dirge which street-children sing, 
why, or with what object, I know not. Grave dogs sit on 
door-steps — their heads patiently cocked on one side, wait- 
ing for the door to be opened, as — in this region of perpetual 
beer-fetching" — they know must soon be the case. The beer 
itself, in vases of strangely-diversified patterns, and borne by 
Hebes of as diversified appearance, is incessantly thread- 
ing the needle through narrow courts and alleys. The 
public-house doors are always on the swing ; the bakers' 
shops (they mostly sell ■ seconds ') are always full ; so are 
the cookshops, so are the coffee-shops : step into one, and you 
shall have a phase of Patmos before you incontinent. 

Albrecht Lurleiberg. who keeps this humble little Deutsche 
Cafee unci Gasthof, as he calls it. commenced business five 
years ago with a single coffee-pot and two cups and saucers. 
That was a little before February, 1848. Some few foreigners 
dropped in to visit him occasionally ; but he was fain to eke out 
his slender earnings by selling sweetstuff. penny dolls, and 
cheap Sunday newspapers. After the first three months' 
saturnalia of revolution in '48, however, exiles began to 
populate Patmos pretty thickly. First, Barbes' and Albert's 
unsuccessful riot ; then the escapade of Ledru-Eollin and 
Louis Blanc ; then the wholesale proscriptions of Hungary, 
Italy, Austria. Russia, and Baden — all these contributed to 
swell the number of Herr Lurleiberg's customers a hundredfold, 
and to fill Patmos to overflowing. The sweetstuff and dolls 



168 GASLIGHT AXD DAYLIGHT. 

disappeared ' right away,' and the coffee-pots and cups and 
saucers multiplied exceedingly. In addition to this, the 
Herr caused to be stretched across the single window a 
canvas blind, on which his name, and the style and title of 
his establishment, were painted in painfully attenuated letters, 
with which, not yet content, he incited young Fritz Schift- 
mahl, the artist, with dazzling prospects of a carte-blanche for 
coffee and tobacco, to depict beneath, in real oil colours, the 
counterfeit presentments of a Pole, a Hungarian, and a 
German embracing each other in a fraternal accolade, all 
smoking tobacco like volcanos sulphur; the legend setting 
forth that true, universal, and political brotherhood are only 
to be found at Albrecht Lurleiberg's. 

In the Herr's back parlour — he once designed in the flush 
of increased business to enlarge it by knocking it into the 
back yard, till warned, by a wary neighbour, of the horrible 
pains and penalties (only second to prcemunire) incurred by 
meddling with a wall in England — in this dirty back parlour 
with rings made by coffee-cups on the rickett} r Pembroke 
tables, and on the coarsely papered, slatternly printed foreign 
newspapers and periodicals, are a crowd of men in every 
variety of beard and moustache and head-dress, in every 
imaginable phase of attire more or less dirty and picturesque. 
— figures such as, were you to see them in the drawings of 
Leech, or Daumier, or Gavarni, you would pronounce ex- 
aggerated and untrue to nature; hooded, tasselled, and braided 
garments of unheard-of fashion ; hats of shapes to make you 
wonder to what a stage the art of "squeezability" had 
arrived ; trousers with unnumbered plaits ; boots made as 
boots seemed never made before ; finger and thumb-rings of 
fantastic fashion ; marvellous gestures, Babel-like diversified 
tongues ; voices anything but (Englishly) human ; the fumes- 
as of a thousand brick-kilns; the clatter as of a thousand- 
spoons : such are the characteristics of this in-door Patmos. 

Here are Frenchmen— ex-representatives of the people, ex- 
ministers, prefects and republican commissaries, Proletaires, 
Fourierists, Phalansterians, disciples of Proudhon, Pierre 
le Eoux and Cahagnet, professors of pantheism, socialism r 
phalansterianism, all the ' isms ' in ismdom ; men yet young, 
but two-thirds of whose lives have been spent in prison or 
in exile. Here are political gaol-birds who have been caged 
in every state prison of Europe; in the citadels of France, 
the cachets of 3Iont St. Michel, the secrets of the Concier- 



PERFIDIOUS PATMOS. 169 

gerie, the pionibi of Venice, the gloomy fastnesses of Ehren- 
breitstein and Breslau and Spandlau, the oubliettes of the 
Spielberg and Salzburg. Here are young men — boys almost 
— of good families and high hopes, blasted by the sirocco of 
civil war. Here are German philosophic democrats — scientific 
conspirators — who between Greek roots and algebraical quan- 
tities, tobacco smoke and heavy folios in German text upon 
international law, have somehow found themselves upon 
barricades and in danger of the fate of Eobert Blum. Here 
are simple-minded German workmen — such honest-faced, 
tawney -bearded young fellows as you see in the beer-cellars 
of Berlin — who have shaken off their dreams of German 
unity to find themselves in this back slum Patmos far away 
from home and friends. Here are swarthy Italians, eyeing 
the Tedeschi (though friendly ones) askance, cursing Eadetzky 
and Gyulay, and telling with wild gesticulations how Xovara 
was fought and Eome defended. Here, and in great numbers, 
are the poor, betrayed, cozened Hungarians, with glossy 
beards, and small embroidered caps and braided coats. They 
are more woe-begone, more scared and wild-looking than the 
rest, for they are come from nearly the uttermost corner cf 
Europe, and have little fellowship save that of misfortune with 
their continental neighbours. Lastly, here are the Poles, those 
historical exiles who have been so long fugitives from their 
country that they have adopted Patmos with a will, and have 
many of them entered into and succeeded in business, but 
would, I think, succeed better if the persons with whom they 
have commercial transactions were able to pronounce their 
names — those jaw-breaking strings of dissonant letters in 
which the vowels are so few that the consonants seem to have 
compassed them round about, like fortifications, to prevent 
their slipping out. 

There are many of these poor refugees (I speak of them in 
general) who sit in coffee-shops similar to Herr Lurleiberg's, 
from early morning till late at night, to save the modicum of 
fire and candle the} 7 would otherwise be compelled to consume 
at home (if home their garrets can be called), and which, God 
knows, they can ill spare. About one o'clock in the day, 
those who are rich enough congregate in the English cook- 
shops, and regale themselves with the cheap cag-mag there 
offered for sale. Towards four or five the foreign eating- 
houses, of which there are many in Patmos of a fifth or sixth- 
rate order of excellence, are resorted to by those who yet 



170 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

adhere to the gastronomic traditions of the land they have 
been driven from ; and there they vainly attempt to delude 
themselves into the belief that they are consuming the fricassees 
and ragouts, the suet puddings and sauerkraut, the maccaroni, 
risotto, and stuffato of France or Germany or Italy — all the de- 
lightful messes on which foreigners feed with such extreme 
gusto and satisfaction. But, alas ! these dishes, though com- 
pounded from foreign recipes and cooked by foreign hands, are 
not, or, at least, do not taste like foreign dishes. Cookery, 
like the amor patrice, is indigenous. It cannot be transplanted. 
It cannot flourish on a foreign soil. I question if the black 
broth of Sparta would have agreed with the Lacedaemonian 
palate if consumed in an England & la mode beef shop. 

Patmos is likewise studded with small foreign tobacco 
shops — limited to the sale of tobacco mostly, for the cigar is 
a luxury in most cases beyond the reach of the exile. You 
must remember that abroad you may obtain a cigar as large 
as an Epping sausage (and as damp), as strong as brandy and 
as fiery as a red-hot poker for. a matter of two sous : — in some 
parts of Belgium and Germany for one sous ; and that in 
England the smallest Cuba of Minories manufacture, smoked 
in a minute and of no particular flavour, costs three halfpence : 
a sum ! There is, to be sure, a harmless milk-mild little roll 
of dark brown colour 9 the component parts of which, I believe, 
are brown paper, hay, and aromatic herbs, vended at the 
charge of one penny. But what would be the use of one of 
those smoke-toys to an exile who is accustomed to wrap him- 
self in smoke as in a mantle ; to smoke by the apertures of 
his mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears ; to eat cigars, so to speak ? 
Thus Patmos solaces itself with cut tobacco (good and cheap 
in England), which it puffs from meerschaums or short clays, 
or rolls up into fragments of foreign newspapers and makes 
cigarettes of. 

If there exist a peculiarity of Patmos which I could not, 
without injustice, avoid adverting to, it is the pleasure its 
inhabitants seem to feel in reading letters. See, as w^e saunter 
down one of Patmos's back streets a German exile, in a pair 
of trousers like a bifurcated carpet bag, stops a braided 
Hungarian with a half quartern loaf under his arm. A sallow 
Italian (one of Garibaldi's men) enters speedily unto them, 
and the three fall greedily to the perusal of a large sheet of 
tissue paper, crossed and re-crossed in red, and black, and 
blue ink, patchworked outside with postage marks of con- 



PERFIDIOUS PAT3IOS. 171 

tinental frontiers and Government stamps. Few of these 
missives reach their destination without some curious little 
scissor marks about the seal, some suspicious little hot-water 
blisters about the wafers, hinting that glazed cocked hats, and 
jack-boots, and police spies have had something to do with 
their letters between their postage and their delivery. In- 
deed, so well is this paternal solicitude on the part of foreign 
governments to know whether their corresponding subjects 
write and spell correctly, known among the refugees, that 
some wary exiles have their letters from abroad addressed to 
' Mr. Simpson Brown/ or ' Mr. Thomas Williams,' such and 
such a street, London; and as foreign governments are rather 
cautions as to how they meddle with the families of the 
Browns and the Williams's — who grow refractory sometimes 
and post their letters in the paddle-boxes of war steamers — * 
the Brown and Williams letters reach London untampered 
with. 

More exiles reading letters. One nearly falls over a dog's- 
meat cart, so absorbed is he in his correspondence ; another, 
bearded like the pard, and with a fur cap like an Armenian 
Calpack, is shedding hot tears on his outstretched paper, 
utterly unconscious of the astonishment of two town-made 
little boys, who have stopped in the very middle of a ' cart- 
wheel ; to stare at the ' furriner a crying/ Poor fellows ! poor 
broken men ! poor hunted wayfarers ! If you, brother Briton, 
well clothed, well fed, well cared for — with X 99 well paid to 
guard you — with houses for the sale of law by retail on every 
side, where you can call for your half-pint of habeas corpus, 
or your Magna Charta, cold without, at any hour in the day 
— if you were in a strange land, proscribed, attainted, poor, 
unfriended, dogged even in your Patmos by spies ; could you 
warrant yourself not to shed some scalding tears, even in a 
fierce fur cap, over a letter from the home you are never to 
see more ? 

My pencil may limn an individual portrait or so in the 
perfidious refuge, and then I must needs row my bark away 
to other shores. Stop at forty-six, Levant Street, if you 
please, over against Leg-bail Court. 

Up four flights of crazy stairs, knocking at a ricketty door, 
you enter a suite of three musty attics. They are very scantily 
furnished, but crowded with articles of the most heterogeneous 
description ; mes marchandises, as the proprietor calls them. 
Variegated shades for lamps, fancy stationery, bon-bon boxes, 



172 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lithographic prints, toys, cigar-cases, nicknacks of every 
description are strewn upon the chairs and table, and cumber 
the very floor ; at one window a dark-eyed milci-looking lady, 
in a dark merino dress, is painfully elaborating a drawing on a 
lithographic stone ; at another a slender girl is bending over a 
tambour frame ; at a desk a round-headed little boy is copying 
music, while in an adjoining apartment — even more denuded of 
furniture and littered with marchandises — are two or three little 
children tumbling among the card-board boxes. All these 
moveables, animate and inanimate, belong to a Roman Marquis 
— the Marchese del Pifferare. He and his have been reared 
in luxury. Time was he possessed the most beautiful villa, 
the finest equipages, the most valuable Eafaelles in the 
Campagna of Eome; but la politique, as he tells you with a 
smile, has brought him down to the level of a species of 
unlicensed hawker, going with his wares (to sell on com- 
mission) from fancy warehouse to fancy warehouse, often 
rebutted, often insulted ; yet picking up an honest livelihood 
somehow. His wife has turned her artistic talent, and his 
eldest daughter her taste for embroidery to account ; his son 
Mithridates copies music for the orchestra in a theatre, for 
living is dear in London, and those helpless little ones among 
the card-board boxes must be looked after. He has been an 
exile for five years. The Holy Father was good enough to 
connive at his escape, and to confer all his confiscated estates 
on a Dominican convent. No one knows what the politique, 
which has been his ruin, exactly was ; nor, I am inclined to 
think, does the good man know very clearly himself. ' We 
got away from Eome,' he tells you mildly, ' with a few hundred 
scudi, and our plate and a picture or two, and went to Mar- 
seilles ; but when we had " eaten " (avevamo mangiati) what we 
had brought with us, we came to England. It was very hard 
at first ; for we had no friends, and could speak nothing but 
French and Italian, and the English are a suspicious people, 
whose first impulse, when they see a foreigner for the first 
time, is to button up their pockets as if he must necessarily 
be a thief.' But the marquis went to work manfully, forgot 
his coronet, and is now doing a very good fancy commission 
business. He has an invention (nearly all refugees have 
inventions) for curing smoky chimneys, which, when he has 
money enough to patent it, he expects will bring him a 
fortune. In the days of his utterest and most dire distress, 
he always managed to pay three shillings every Sunday for 



LEICESTER SQUAEE. 173 

the sittings of himself, his wife, and daughter at a foreign 
Catholic chapel, and to wear every day the cleanest of white 
neckcloths, fastened no man knows how, for no man ever saw 
the tie thereof. 

Within these sorry streets — these dingy slums — are swept 
together the dead leaves, the rotten branches, the withered 
fruits from the tree of European liberty. The autumn 
blast of despotism has eddied them about from the ends of 
Europe, has chased them from land to land, has wafted them 
at last into this perfidious Patmos, where there is liberty to 
act, and think, and breathe, but also, alas ! liberty to Starve. 

England, happily unconscious of the oppressions and 
exasperations that have driven these men here, try sometimes 
to spare some little modicum of substantial relief, some 
crumbs of comfort, some fragile straws of assistance to the 
poor drowning exiles ! Their miseries are appalling. They 
cannot dig (for few, if any, Englishmen will call a foreigner's 
spade into requisition), to beg they are nobly ashamed. They 
do not beg, nor rob, nor extort. They starve in silence. 
The French and Hungarian refugees suffer more, perhaps, 
than those of other nations. The former have by no means 
an aptitude for acquiring the English language, and are, 
besides, men mostly belonging to the professional classes of 
society — classes wofully overstocked in England ; the latter 
seldom know any language but their own — a language about 
as useful and appreciated here as Cochin- Chinese. Only 
those who have wandered through Patmos, who have watched 
the gates of the London Docks at early morning when the 
chance labourers apply for work, who have sat in night coffee- 
houses, and explored dark arches, can know what awful 
shifts some of these poor refugees, friendless, foodless, house- 
less, are often put to. 



XYI. 

LEICESTER SQUARE. 



Did Archimedes square the circle? The legend (I have a 
great respect for legends, mendacious though they often be) 
says that he did. The confident legend has it that he really, 
truly, and completely succeeded. That, chalk in hand, 
heedless in his scientific pre-occupation of the sack of Syra- 



174 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

cuse, lie bent over the magic diagram he had traced on the 
floor of his humble domicile, contemplating with joy and 
exultation the glorious end by which his labours had been 
crowned. That then, however, a Soldier entered, hot with 
plunder and blood-spilling. That with his murderous javelin 
he smote the sage to death ; and that the blood of Archimedes 
flowing in a sluggish stream effaced the diagram (which was 
to the ruthless warrior an unmeaning assemblage merely of 
lines curved and straight). And the circle remains unsquared 
to this day. 

Many have experimentalized on the mighty problem since 
the legendary days of the Greek philosopher ; but the failures 
have been as numerous as the attempts. Not that the thing 
is impossible ; oh no ! All of us have, more or less, friends 
and acquaintances on the very verge — the extremest point — ■ 
of squaring the circle, as also of discovering perpetual motion, 
paying the National Debt, and accomplishing some trifling 
little undertakings of that description. Only, they never do. 
They resemble somewhat the .poor little 'punters' one sees at 
Hombourg and Baden-Baden — the men with ' systems ' — 
infallible ' martingales,' believers in masse en avant, who would 
always have won fifty thousand florins to a dead certainty, in 
one coup, my dear sir, if red had only turned up again. But 
it didn't. Bed never does turn up when you want it. So with 
the circle-squarers, perpetual motion discoverers, National- 
Debt liquidators, and inventors of directing power to balloons. 
Something always occurs at the very ace and nick of time — 
the critical moment — to nip their invention in the bud. My 
friend A. would have squared the circle, years ago, if he had 
not been sentenced to six months' imprisonment in one of 
Her Majesty's gaols for writing threatening letters to the 
Earl of Derby, in which the Circle was mixed up, somehow, 
with a desire to have his lordship's Life. B. is only deterred 
from terminating his experiments by the want of a loan 
(temporary) of one pound five. C.'s landlady, in the neigh- 
bourhood of Bed Lion Square, has impounded for unpaid rent 
his philosophical apparatus, without which it is impossible for 
him to complete his discoveries. D., on the very eve of 
success, took it into his head to preach the Millennium, as 
connected with the New Jerusalem and the Latter-day Saints, 
in the vicinity of Botherhithe ; and as for E., the only man 
who they say has squared the circle these few hundred years, 
he is at present so raving mad in a lunatic asylum, that we 



LEICESTER SQUARE. 175 

can't make much of the desperate diagrams lie chalks on the 
walls of Ins day room, mixed as are his angles, arcs, and dia- 
meters with humorous couplets and caricatures of public cha- 
racters. I might, if I chose, enumerate initials which would 
use up the alphabet twice over ; from M., who combined philo- 
sophy with the manufacture of Bengal lights, and blew himself, 
and half his neighbourhood, up one day, down to Z., who, im- 
pressed with a conviction that the circle was only to be 
squared in the interior of Africa, went out to the Gold Coast 
in a trader, and was supposed to have been eaten up by the 
natives, somewhere between Timbuctoo and the Mountains of 
the Moon. Still, the circle remains unsquarecl. 

I, who am no mathematician, and would sooner throw my- 
self off the parapet of the pons asinorum, or go to sleep in one of 
the dry arches underneath, than trudge over it, not presuming 
to attempt squaring a circle, humbly intend to see if I cannot 
circle a square. Say Leicester Square, in the county of 
Middlesex. 

In my opinion Leicester Square, or Leicester Fields, or ' the 
Square,' as its inhabitants call it, or ' Laystarr Squarr* as the 
French have it, offers in many of its features some striking 
points of resemblance to an institution expatiated upon ; by 
Monsieur Philippe de Lolme, called the British Constitution, 
The Square, like the Constitution, has been infinitely patched, 
and tinkered, and altered. Some of its bulwarks have been 
broken down, some of its monuments have been utterly 
destroyed ; and coaches-and-six may now be driven where 
edifices were. But in their entirety both institutions are 
unchanged. The Square and the Constitution have yet their 
Habeas Corpus and their Bill of Eights. Much has been 
abolished, changed, improved : but the Square is the Square, 
and the Constitution is the Constitution ; and the Briton may 
point to both with pride, as immutable evidence of the sta- 
bility of the institutions of a free country. 

Before I commence circling seriatim this square — which I 
may call the liver of London, often spoken of but little known 
— let me say a few words of its history. This quadrangle of 
houses once went by the name of Leicester Fields. These 
fields (now partially covered by Mr. YTyld's great globe) were 
built round, three sides of them, about 1635, what time 
Charles the First was in difficulties about ship-money, and 
thirsting for Mr. Pym's ears. During the civil wars and 
Commonwealth, the powers. that were, occupied themselves 



176 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

rather more with pulling down mansions than with building 
them; and the south side remained uncovered with houses 
until the days of that virtuous and exemplary monarch, who 
passed the bill for the better observance of the Sabbath, and 
murdered Algernon Sydney. From 1671 to the middle of the 
eighteenth century, Leicester Fields were Leicester Fields. 
Then the royal German gentleman, second of his name, 
endowed the enclosure in the centre with an equestrian statue 
of his gracious self (brought from Canons, the seat of the 
Duke of Chandos), and the fields became thenceforward a 
square, and fashionable. 

Fashionable, to a certain extent, they had been before ; 
since Charles the Second's time, Leicester Fields had boasted 
the possession of a palace. Yes, between where there are now 
sixpenny shows and cafes chantants with a Shades beneath, 
and where there is a cigar-shop, once stood Leicester House, 
built by Bobert Sydney, Earl of Leicester, the father of poor 
Algernon Sydney, of Henry Sydney (the handsome Sydney of 
De Grammont's Memoirs), and of Lady Dorothy Sydney, the 
Sacharissa of Waller the poet. Here, when the Sydneys had 
come to grief, lived and died the Queen of Bohemia. Here re- 
sided the great Colbert, Louis the Fourteenth's ablest minister 
of finance and commerce, when on an embassy to King Charles 
the Second. Here, in 1703, lived (hiring the house from 
Lord Leicester) the ambassador from the Emperor of Germany. 
Prince Eugene lay at Leicester House, and courtiers (no 
doubt) lied there in 1713. In 1718, no less a personage than 
the Prince of Wales bought Leicester House, and made it his 
town residence. Pennant, that sly old antiquary — whose wit, 
though dry, like old port, is as nutty and full-flavoured—calls 
it the ' pouting house for princes ; ' for here, when the next 
Prince of Wales, Frederick, quarrelled with his papa (who 
had quarrelled with his), he, too, removed to Leicester House 
and kept a little sulky Court there. 

Of Leicester House, palatially speaking, what now remains ? 
Of that princely north-east corner of the square, what is there, 
save a foreigner-frequented cigar-shop ? Stay, there is yet the 
Shades, suggestive still of semi-regal kitchens, in their under- 
ground vastness. And haply there is, above Saville House, a 
palace once, for George the Third's sister was married from 
thence — so says the 'European Magazine' for 1761 — to a 
German prince, and, to her misfortune, poor soul, as her German 
prison-cell shalltell her in years to come. And Saville House is 



LEICESTEE SQUAKE. 177 

a palace still, far more palatial than if kings sat in its upper 
rooms, and princes in its gates. It is the palace of showman- 
ship. It is the greatest booth in Europe. 

Saville House ! What Londoner, what country cousin who 
visited the metropolis twenty years ago, does not immediately 
connect that magic establishment with the name of Miss Lin- 
wood and her needlework ? It was very wonderful. I, as a 
child, never could make it out much, or settle satisfactorily to 
my own mind, why it should not, being carpeting, have been 
spread upon the floor instead of being hung against the wall. 
I did not like the eyes, noses, and lips of the characters being 
all in little quadrangles ; and I was beaten once, I think, for 
saying that I thought my sister's sampler superior to any 
of Miss Linwood's productions. Yet her work was very 
wonderful; not quite equal to Gobelin tapestry, perhaps, 
but colossal as respects patience, neatness, and ingenuity. 
Of and concerning Miss Linwood I was wont in my nonage 
to be much puzzled. Who and what was this marvellous 
being? I have since heard, and I now believe that Miss 
Linwood was a simple-minded, exemplary schoolmistress, some- 
where near Leicester — a species of needle working Hannah 
More ; but at that time she was to me a tremendous myth — a 
tapestry- veiled prophetess — a sybil working out perpetual 
enigmas in silk and worsted. 

The shows at Saville House remained alive o ! What show 
of shows came after Miss Linwood ? There were some clumsy 
caricatures of good pictures and good statues, enacted on a 
turn-table by brazen men and women, called Poses Plastiques. 
I, your servant, assisted once at a representation of this de- 
scription, where I think the subject was Adam and Eve in 
the garden of Eden. Adam by Herr Something, Eve by 
Madame Somebody, and the serpent by a real serpent, a bloated 
old snake quite sluggish and dozy, and harmless enough, 
between his rabbits, to be tied in a knot round the tree. The 
most amusing part of the entertainment was the middle thereof, 
at which point two warriors arrayed in the uniform of Her 
Majest} r appeared on the turn-table, and claimed Adam as a 
deserter from the third Buffs ; which indeed he was, and so 
was summarily marched off with a great-coat over his flesh- 
ings, and a neat pair of handcuffs on his wrists — the which 
sent me home moralizing on the charming efficiency of the 
Lord Chamberlain and his licencers, who can strike a harm- 
less joke out of a pantomime, and cannot touch such fellows as 



178 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

these, going vagabondizing about with nothing to cover them. 
I think I went the same evening to a certain theatre, where 
I saw the most magnificent parable in the New Testament 
parodied into a gew-gaw spectacle — a convention between the 
property-man, the scene-painter, and the corps de ballet — ■ 
which made me think that the Lord Chamberlain and his 
licencers did not dispense their justice quite even-handedly ; 
that they strained at the gnats a little too much, maybe, and 
swallowed the camels a little too easily. 

Serpents both of land and sea ; — panoramas of all the rivers' 
of the known world ; jugglers ; ventriloquists ; imitators of 
the noises of animals ; dioramas of the North Pole, and the 
gold-diggings of California; somnambulists (very lucid) ; 
ladies who have cheerfully submitted to have their heads cut 
off nightly at sixpence per head admission ; giants ; dwarfs ; 
sheep with six legs ; calves born inside out ; marionnettes ; 
living marionnettes ; lecturers on Bloomerism ; expositors of 
orrery — all of these have by turns found a home in Saville 
House. In the enlarged cosmopolitanthrophy of that mansion, 
it has thrown open its arms to the universe of exhibitions. One 
touch of showmanship makes the whole world kin ; and this 
omni-showing house would accommodate with equal pleasure, 
Acrobats in its drawing-rooms, Spiritual Rappers in its upper 
rooms, the Poughkeepsie Seer in the entrance hall, and the 
Learned Pig in the cellar. 

But I shall be doing foul injustice to Saville House were I 
to omit to mention one exhibition that it has of late years 
adopted. The assault of arms ! Who has not seen the ad- 
venturous life -guardsman effect that masterly feat, the ' severi- 
sation' of the leg of mutton ; and that more astonishing exploit, 
the scientific dissection at two strokes of the carcase of a 
sheep ? Who has not applauded the masterly cutting asunder 
of the bar of lead ; the ' Saladin feat ;' the terrific combat 
between the broadsword and bayonet ; the airy French fencing 
and small-sword practice (like an omelette souffl.ee after solid 
beef and pudding) ? And then the wind-up, when Saville 
House, forgetting its antecedents of the drama (slightly ille- 
gitimate), and puppets and panoramas, takes manfully to fisti- 
cuffs ! I am reminded of that company of Athenian actors, 
who, in the earlier days of the Greek drama, essayed a per- 
formance before an Athenian public ; but who, finding their 
efforts not by any means appreciated or understood by their 
audience, took refuge in some gladiatorial acquirements they 



LEICESTER SQUARE. 179 

were lucky enough to possess, and ' pitched into ' each other 
manfully, to the intense delight of the Areopagus. I am re- 
minded, too, by the way, during this ' wind-up,' of the pro- 
pinquity of certain gentlemen, whose bow-legs, green cut-away 
coats, flattened noses, fancy shawls, scarred lips, chameleon- 
coloured eyes, swollen mottled hands, Oxonian shoes (tipped), 
closely-cropped hair, bull necks, large breast-pins, &c, remind 
me, in their turn, that I am in the antechamber of the Eing ; 
which leads me to descend into the street, foregoing the 
pleasure of witnessing the 4 Grand exhibition of wrestling 
between two Southerners,' wherein I am promised a living 
illustration of the genuine Devonshire kick, and the legiti- 
mate Cornish hug. Formerly I was wont to linger, by the 
peristyle of Saville House, at the foot of its wide exterior 
staircase ; though Mr. Cantelo's acolyte, next door, melliflu- 
ously invited me to ascend and see how eggs were hatched by 
steam ; though there was a rival lady with her head undergoing 
the very process of decapitation next door to him ; with a 
horned lady, a bearded lady, and a mysterious lady, on the 
other side. Saville House has yet charms for me which I can- 
not lightly pass by. There are the Shades, a remnant of the old 
London night cellars, bringing to mind Tom King's Coffee- 
house, and the cellar where Strap had that famous adventure, 
and the place where the admired Captain Macheath and his 
virtuous companions first heard ■ the sound of coaches.' 
Saville House boasts also of a billiard-room, where there are 
celebrated professors in mustachoes, who will give you eighty 
out of the hundred and beat you ; who can do anything with 
the balls and cues save swallowing them ; who are clever enough 
to make five hundred a year at billiards, and do make it, some 
of them ; where there are markers who look like marquises in 
their shirtsleeves and difficulties. I have nought more to say 
of the palace of my square, save that the Duke of Gloucester 
lived at Leicester House, in 1767, previous to its final de- 
cadence as a royal residence ; that Sir Ashton Lever formed 
here the collection of curiosities known as the Leverian 
Museum ; and that New Lisle Street was built on the site of 
the gardens of Leicester House in 1791. 

To resume the circling of my square may I beg you to pass 
Cranbourne Street, also a large foreign hotel, also a hybrid 
floridly eccentric building of gigantic dimensions, where the 
Pavilion at Brighton seems to have run foul of the Alhambra, 
and repaired damages with the temple of Juggernaut : splicing 

N 2 



180 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

on a portion of a Chinese pagoda as a jury-mast, and filling 
up odd leaks with bits of the mosque of St. Sophia. 

Passing this enigmatical habitation (now a circus for horse- 
riders), tarry, oh viator! ere you come to Green Street, by 
Pagliano's Sabloniere Hotel, a decent house, where there is 
good cheer after the Italian manner. The northern half of 
this hotel was, until 1764, a private dwelling-house — its door 
distinguished by a bust made of pieces of cork cut and glued 
together, and afterwards gilt, and known as the ' Painter's 
Head.' The painter's head was cut by the painter himself 
who lived there ; and the painter was that painter, engraver 
and moralist, that prince of pictorial philosophers, 

Whose pictured morals charm the mind, 
And through the eye correct the heart ; 

the King's Sergeant Painter, William Hogarth. 

I would give something to be able to see that merry, sturdy ? 
bright-eyed, fresh-coloured little fellow in his sky-blue coat, 
and bob wig, and archly cocked hat, trudging forth from his 
house. I would hypothecate some portion of my vast estates 
to have been in Leicester Square the day Will Hogarth first 
set up his coach ; to have watched him writing that wrathful 
letter to the nobleman who objected to the too faithful vrai- 
semblance of his portrait, wherein he threatened, were it not 
speedily fetched away, to sell it, with the addition of horns 
and a tail, to a wild beast showman, who doubtless had his 
show in Leicester Fields hard by ; to have seen hirn in his 
painting-room putting all his savage irony of colour and ex- 
pression into the picture of the bully-poet Churchill ; or 
' biting in ' that grand etching of sly, cruel, worthless Simon 
Fraser, Lord Lovat, counting the forces of the Pretender on 
his fingers ; or correcting the proof-sheets of the Analysis of 
Beauty ; or scarifying Jack Wilkes on copper ; or haply y 
keeping quiet, good-humoured company with his gentle lady 
wife, Jane Thornhill, telling her how he engraved pint pots 
and masquerade tickets in his youth, and how he painted his 
grandest pictures for the love of her. W r e have painters, and 
engravers, and moralists now-a-days, and to spare, I trow ; 
but thy name will long smell sweet as violets, Will Hogarth, 
though thou wert neither a Eoyal Academician nor a ' Sir.' 

Yet, circling round about, stand momentarily at the corner 
of a little street — Green Street by name — full of musty little 
book-stalls and fugacious shops. Fugacious I call them, for 



LEICESTER SQUARE. 181 

their destinies are as fleeting as their proprietors. They are 
everything by turns, and nothing long : now betting-offices, 
now print-shops, now cigar-shops, anon oyster-shops, coffee- 
shops, brokers' shops. In Green Street shall yon be sensible 
also of an odour very marked, of the cookery of the various 
foreign boarding-houses and cook-shops of the neighbourhood ; 
and, towering above the dingy little houses, shall you see 
the Elizabethan chimney-shaft of the St. Martin's baths and 
wash-houses : a beacon of cleanliness to the neighbourhood ; a 
Pharos of soapsuds ; a finger-post to thrift and comfort. 

We pass St. Martin's Street — -street of no thoroughfare, but 
remarkable for Mr. Bertolini's restaurant, and formerly famous 
as the residence of Sir Isaac Newton. We pass the Soup- 
kitchen Association's Offices, Star Street, a score of private 
houses, and, halting at number forty-seven, we descry a 
mansion of considerable dimensions, formerly the property of 
Lord Inchiquin, afterwards the Western Literary and Scientific 
Institution, then the resting-place, I think, of a panorama of 
the Australian Gold Diggings ; but, before all these, residence 
of Sir Joshua Keynolds, Knight, the first President of the 
Eoyal Academy. 

It is something to think, gazing at this plain house from the 
shabby cab-stand opposite (where there are always six cabs, 
and apparently never any one to hire thenO that to number 
forty-seven came, sixty years ago, all that was great, noble, 
and beautiful — all that was witty, learned, and brave — in this 
land. It is something to think that the plain awkward 
country lad, poor in purse and pauper in influence in the 
beginning, should in this number forty-seven, from 1761 to 
1792, have held his state undisputed, undisturbed as the 
pontifex maximus of portrait-painting — the Merlin of his art 
— that the steps of his house should have been swept by the 
ermine of judges, the lawn of prelates, the robes of peers, the 
satin and brocade of princesses ; that there should have been 
about his ante-rooms, thrown into corners like unconsidered 
trifles, of as little account as the gew-gaws of a player's tiring- 
room, the fans of duchesses, the batons of victorious generals, 
the badges of chivalry, the laurels of poets, the portfolios of 
ministers. It is something to think that if some spoony lords, 
some carpet warriors, some tenth transmitters of a foolish face, 
-have mingled with the brilliant crowd at forty- seven, Leicester 
Fields, its rooms have re-echoed to the silvery laughter of 
Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, to the commanding tones of 



182 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Chatham, and Mansfield, and Camden. It is more to think 
that to this house came, to hold familiar converse with its 
master, the wise men of England. 

Come back, shades of the mighty dead, to number forty- 
seven ! Come back from Beaconsfield, Edmund Burke I 
Come back, Percy, scholar and poet ; Joe Warburton ; lively, 
vain, kind-hearted David Garrick, courtly Topham Beauclerc, 
staunch old General Oglethorpe, drawing diagrams of the 
fields of Belgrade and Peterwardein with filberts, and nut- 
crackers, and port wine ! Come back, stout-hearted Pasquale 
di Paoli ; gossipping, toadying, boozy Boswell. Come back, 
oh, thou leviathan of literature, with the large wig and larger 
heart, with the rolling gait and voice of thunder, come back, 
Samuel Johnson ! 

Do thou also return, sprightly, kindly spectre in suit of 
Filby-made Tyrian bloom — poet and novelist and essayist and 
dramatist, for whom, wert thou alive and hard up for paper, 
I would send my last shirt to the paper-mill to make Bath 
post. Eeturn, if for a moment, Oliver Goldsmith ! Sins and 
follies there may be posted against thee in ihe Book, but surely 
tears enough have been shed over the ' Vicar of Wakefield ' to 
blot them out, and airs of light-hearted laughter have been 
wafted from ' She Stoops to Conquer ' to dry the leaves again a 
thousand times ! 

But they cannot come back, these shades, at my poor 
bidding. Beaconsfield and Poet's Corner, St. Paul's and 
Dromore, will hold their own until the time shall come. I 
cannot even wander through the genius hallowed rooms of 
Eeynolds's house. Literary and scientific apparatus, and 
panorama, have effaced all vestige thereof. I can but muse in 
the spirit on the dining-room w T here these great ones met — on 
the octagon painting-room with the arm-chair on a dais, with 
the high window looking to the northward darkened on the 
day of Goldsmith's death, with the palette and pencils laid by 
for the day when Johnson was buried, and on every Sunday 
afterwards, according to his dying wish. 

My square is nearly circled. AVhen I have stated that 
David Loggan, the engraver immortalised by Pope, lived next 
door to Hogarth, and that next door on the other side resided 
(after the painter's death) John Hunter, the surgeon, who here 
formed the famous anatomical museum, called the Hunterian 
collection, and gave every Sunday evening, during the winter 
months, medical soirees, where matters germane to the scalpel 



LEICESTER SQUARE. 183 

and lancet were pleasantly discussed over coffee and muffins, 
I think I have named all that Leicester Square offers of 
remarkable, historically speaking. I am not aware that any 
nobleman ever had his head cut off here ; that Lord Eochester 
ever said anything witty from any of its balconies ; or that 
any patriot, from Jack Cade to Mr. Hunt, ever addressed 
British freeholders within its precincts. 

The diameter I proposed to myself is well-nigh completed ; 
but there is yet the centre of my self-traced circle to be 
visited. I shall say no more of Mr. Wyld's globe, save that it 
is a very excellent viva voce course of lessons in geography. I 
will not touch upon the bazaar that was to have been built 
there once ; but I must, for the benefit of my untravelled 
readers, say a word about the centre of the square before it was 
built upon. 

AY here now is a lofty dome was once, neophyte in 
London, a howling desert enclosed by iron railings. There 
was no grass, but there was a feculent, colourless vegetation 
like mildewed thatch upon a half-burnt cottage. There were 
no gravel-walks, but there were sinuous gravelly channels and 
patches, as if the cankerous earth had the mange. There 
were rank weeds heavy with soot. There were blighted 
shrubs like beggars' staves or paralytic hop-poles. There 
were shattered marble vases like bygone chemists' mortars 
which had lost their pestles, half choked with black slimy 
mould like preparations for decayed blisters. The earth seemed 
to bring forth crops, but they were crops of shattered tiles, 
crumbling bricks, noseless kettles, and soleless boots. The 
shrubs had on their withered branches, strange fruits — 
battered hats of antediluvian shape, and oxidised saucepan 
lids. The very gravel was rusty and mixed with fragments 
of willow-pattern plates, verdigrised nails, and spectral horse- 
shoes. The surrounding railings, rusty, bent, and twisted as 
they were, were few and far between. The poor of the neigh- 
bourhood tore them out by night, to make pokers of. In the 
centre, gloomy, grimy, rusty, was the Statue — more hideous 
(if such a thing may be) than the George the Fourth enormity 
in Trafalgar Square — more awful than the statue of the Com- 
mendatore in Don Giovanni. 

There were strange rumours and legends current in Leices- 
terian circles concerning this enclosure. Men told, holding 
their breath, of cats run wild in its thickets, and grown as 
large as leopards. There was no garden, and if any man 



184 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

possessed a key to the enclosure, he was too frightened to use 
it. People spoke of a dragon, a ghoule, a geni, who watched 
over the square, and for some fell purpose kept it desolate. 
Some said, the statue was the geni; but in 1851, when the 
Globe was proposed, he showed himself to the world, howled 
dismally, and did furious battle to keep his beloved Square 
intact in all its ruin and desolation. This geni, or dragon's 
name was, if I remember right, Vested Interests. He was 
vanquished. 



XVII. 

DAYBREAK. 

It is but a narrow thread of grayish hue, streaking the 
murky horizon in the quarter the sun comes from, that I take 
to spin my feeble web from. Fragile it is, and of as little 
account as the long, slender, attenuated filament I have seen 
stretching from the limbs of an oak (whose frame has grown 
gaunter, but whose muscles seem to grow stronger in its 
rigid, iron knots, like those of an old athlete) down to the 
cowslips in a field beneath : the aerial suspension bridge of 
the J spider. Break of day is my slender, gray, nickering 
thread ; but Day and Night are the strong oak and the wide 
field they connect ; and my thread may serve as a humble 
link between two mighty subjects. 

And my thread — daybreak — should it not be a chord in 
the harp on which Nature at least for ever sings hymns of 
praise ; if men do sometimes fail to pray ? And daybreak, 
is it not a bell, a marriage-bell to millions— ^-a passing-bell to 
dying millions too — a joy-bell and a knell of death ? And 
daybreak, is it not the main, from which tend smaller pipes 
of light? And daybreak, is it not the chandelier at M'hich 
both wise and foolish virgins kindle their lamps, to light them 
their day's work through? The night may seem lifelong; 
but daybreak comes : it must come — like Death. 

Yet, omnipresent as it is, how many children of humanity 
there be who rise, and work, and go to bed again, through a 
lifetime, without once beholding my thread. 'Does one man 
in a million,' asks Paley, in the Natural Theology, * know 
how oval frames are turned ?' — Is there one man in a thou- 
sand, I will less boldly ask, who has seen the break of day ? 



DAYBKEAK. 185 

If all had seen it, what would there be left for me to write 
about ? If everybody knew everything, how many, many 
days the poor schoolmasters and philosophers would have to 
wait for the bread they had cast on the waters ! 

What aspect, observation, has daybreak on a railway ? "We 
have left London by the night mail for Liverpool. It is 
August weather, and day breaks just after we have passed 
Crewe. With a rasping, shattering express motion have we 
come over the rails. Eeading was out of the question. A 
pale gentleman in spectacles essayed it at Watford ; but the 
letters danced up and down in all manner of ways against his 
gold-rimmed pebbles, as though the matrix they (the letters) 
had descended from had been a maniac ; and. they, in con- 
sequence, mad type, wholly unsuitable for so grave a work as 
' The Architectural Psychology of the Middle Ages, as Ex- 
hibited in Flying Buttresses,' which the pale gentleman 
essayed to peruse but gave up at last in despair. 

Another traveller, a political-looking man with gray whis- 
kers and a determined neckcloth — the sort of man, I warrant, 
who looks sharply after the member for his borough, and 
heads a requisition to him to resign his seat two or three 
times in the course of a session — tried also to read a leader 
in that day's ' Times ;' but, in spite of the large, bold type, 
and of his folding the paper into a small, fierce compass, and 
holding it with both hands, with a paper-knife pressed over 
the line immediately below the one he read, and so moved 
downwards, and nearly gluing his eyes to it in the bargain ; 
in spite of this he had no better success ; and muttering 
' Unprincipled print ' (doubtless because he couldn't read it), 
went austerely to sleep, and dreamed, probably, of the brisk 
rubbing up he will give the honourable member for Throttle- 
bury, shortly, concerning his infamous tergiversation about 
that poor burked little bill which was to have given sewers to 
Throttlebury. A commercial gentleman, with his great-coat 
full of gold pencil-cases, vainly attempted at Eugby to jot 
down an order in his note-book, and failing to make anything 
but incoherent zigzag diagrams, bound a railway rug round 
his head till it assumed the semblance of a grenadier's cap 
that had been stencilled at a paper-stainer's, and went to 
sleep, too. Somebody (I hope he didn't sit near me), not 
being able to read, or to sleep, or to snore and gasp and bark 
like the ball of something with a wide-awake hat in the left- 
hand off corner, and afraid to sing, presumed to smoke, swal- 



186 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lowing the major part of the fumes through modesty, and 
tilting the ashes cautiously out of the little Venetian jalousies 
above the window. 

We all got out at Wolverton, where the commercial tra- 
veller disappeared — perhaps to take an order for pork pies ; 
and the pale gentleman in spectacles was indignant (and 
justly so, I think), that he could not have threepenn'orth of 
brandy in his tea. So, through the black night have we 
rushed fiercely through black county after county. At Staf- 
ford, the ball of something (which has turned out to bo 
camlet cloak), speaking for the first and last time, has re- 
marked that ' it is a long train ' (which it is not). At some 
intermediate station — whose name, as it was yelped forth by 
a porter as he hurried by thrusting grease into the hot greedy 
maw of the axle-box, might just as well have been cried in 
Chaldee or Sanscrit for anything I could make of it — a sim- 
pering gentleman with a gold chain peeping even from among 
his many coats, and a Fez cap, proposed to enter the car- 
riage ; but, drawing back, declared that ' somebody had been 
smoking,' and that it was a ' disgwace ;' whereupon the guard 
asked nobody in particular if anybody had been smoking; 
and, seeming perfectly satisfied with the assurance that no- 
body had, remarked that 'it was the engine— maybe,' and 
popped my simpering gentleman into the next carriage, in 
which there were two old maids, one purple satin lady of 
Lambertian or Armitagian bulk, a young child (querulous), a 
black nurse, and a gentleman subject to fits — having them, 
too, every other station or so. No smoking there ! 

Far behind lies Crewe, though but a minute passed. I 
draw down the window, and the keen morning breeze charges 
in at the aperture like a Cossack. And in the eastern horizon 
Day breaks. How many cocks, I wonder, in all the lands day 
breaks upon are singing their morning hymn now ? I listen 
for one Chanticleer ; but the engine has a crow of its own, 
and a yell for going into tunnels, and a howl for coming out 
of them, and hideous noises for all seasons and every inch of 
the road. All the cocks in Lancashire might crow them- 
selves hoarse ere I could hear them amid this din. 

Day breaks fast, and the slender gray thread expands into 
a wide sheet of pale light. Against it the coldly violet clouds 
are defined in sharp and rigid relief. These are the frag- 
ments of the veil of night yielding slowly, and, as it were, 
reluctantly, to daylight. Slower and slower, almost imper- 



DAYBEEAK. 187 

ceptibly, as day gains on night, one great bank of cloud sinks 
in nearly a horizontal line into Erebus, like a pair of flats in a 
theatrical spectacle ; but the side pieces of clouds — the wings 
and set pieces, if I may call them so — split up into jagged,, 
obstinate, refractory cloudlets over the sky, -which by this 
time has turned from ashy pallid gray to silver blue — not 
sky-blue, as we generally understand it, yet — but a blue like 
that we see in the shadow part of silver lace. These clouds 
are of fantastic shapes : some are dark slices, long, and almost 
mathematically straight ; others torn and zigzag-shaped ; some 
take the semblance of fiendish heads, and hideous animals 
with more legs than were ever dreamt of in the philosophy of 
Buffon or Cuvier. Fast as the day breaks, and broad day- 
light as it is by this time, the genial, warming influence of 
the blessed sun is yet wanting. The guests are bidden and 
the banquet is spread ; but the bride and bridegroom are not 
come home from church yet. The contract is drawn up, but 
lacks the signature. The pyre is heaped up and needs only 
one friendly torch to set it in a blaze. 

Coldly garish yet is the white, sunless day. Funereally 
black and dismal loom tufted masses of tall trees — their um- 
brageous mantles chequered here and there by diamond 
flashes of the sunlight coming up behind them. Coldly gray 
are the wide leas and ploughed fields-. Coldly black are the 
hedgerows, and hayricks, and stunted pollard willows, and 
lonely cowshippons. Coldly dark and dismal, rear their 
heads, the roofed posts of the electric telegraph — looking, 
in the dubious light, like gibbets. Coldly the wind keeps 
blowing in at the window ; so at least tells me my fellow- 
traveller in the gold pencil line — tells me so, too, in a re- 
markably discourteous tone, with some nonsensical allusion to 
the ear-ache. I shut the window and pity him. He thinks 
nothing of the break of day — thinks about it no more, nay, 
not so much as that flapping crow overhead — no more than 
that rustic in the clay-soiled fustian, who has been up since 
three to fodder the cows and lead Ball and Dapple to the pond 
to drink, and who now leans over a gate on the line, smoking 
his break-of-day pipe, and whistling bewhiles. And yet, 
perhaps, I libel this clay-stained man. Perchance he does 
think of day and of its Maker — in his own rough untutored 
way sees in the clouds, and the sky, and the light, as clear a 
connection between the varied Nature and the varied God, as 
he knows to exist between the two plain sets of iron rails 



188 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

on tlie gravel road before him, and the mighty terminus at 
Euston Square — two hundred miles away. 

Wra-a-a-ah ! the train enters a tunnel. All is black for 
half a dozen minutes — then emerging, we see the sun getting 
up in the East like a refreshed generous giant, scattering gold 
over the world. 

Break of day after the Honourable Mrs. Plover's soiree 
dansante. The Honourable Mrs. Plover was the youngest and 
seventh daughter of General the Earl of Duxandraques of 
Liverwing Hall. The footmen afc Liverwing have had for 
some years a somewhat Hebrew-Caucasian cast of countenance, 
and evil-minded men do say they are bailiffs in disguise. 
The noble lord's solicitor and heirs male do not dare to trust 
him, if they can help it, with as much wood as would serve 
for a lucifer match — so addicted is he to cutting down the 
timber on his estate, and afterwards ■ cutting away ' with the 
ligneous proceeds to Hombourg or Baden-Baden. The Honour- 
able Miss de Bressbohun (that is the family name of the Dux- 
andraques) had for her fortune only a remarkably pretty 
face, and an assortment of the most ■ captivating blonde 
ringlets you ever saw ; so she married Mr. Eufus Plover, 
who is ambiguously known to be ' on 'Change ' and brings 
fabulously large sums of money off it. They have a grand 
country-house at Gunnersbury, and a sweet little marine villa 
at Brighton — all Venetian blinds and dazzling stucco ; and, 
to crown all, a jewel of a house, Number 402 (a), Toppletoton 
Street, Crinoline Square. In this Elysian mansion (Madame 
de Pompadour could not have spent more in upholstery upon 
it than did Mrs. Plover,) the enchanting soirees dansantes of the 
Honourable Mrs. P. are held. 

This had been a grand night for the P. family. Half Long 
Acre in the way of carriages. Half the Heralds' College in 
the armorial bearings on the coach panels. Quite a Zoological 
Garden of lions rampant, cou chant, and passant, griffins spar- 
ring wildly with their paws at inoffensive shields, and birds', 
beasts', and fishes' heads drawn and quartered in every imagi- 
nary way. Quite a little course of ' Latin without a master ' 
in the heraldic mottos. 

And such company ! No merchants, nor ship-owners, nor 
people of that sort — not even one of Mr. Plover's * Exchange ' 
friends. Their exclusion was won from Mr. P. after a hard 
battle the very morning of the ball, and only after the conces- 
sion on the part of his lady of two trifles and a model of the 



DAYBKEAK. 189 

Great Exhibition in confectionary, to be withdrawn from the 
menu of the supper. The nearest approach to commerce 
among the guests was the great Sir Blanke Cheque, the 
banker of Lombard Street, who has three daughters married 
to peers of the realm, and one to the Eussian Count Candle- 
atevich, who is immensely rich, but dare not return to Eussia, 
where he would infallibly be knouted, have his nose and ears 
slit, and be sent to Tobolsk, for daring to overstay the time 
allowed him by the Czar for a continental trip, and for pre- 
suming to go to a concert where Miss Crotchet sang the ' Fair 
Land of Poland ;' a due minute of which last crime was made 
the very next day bylittle Juda Benikowski, the Muscovite* 
Jew spy, and duly recorded against the count in the archives 
of the Eussian Consulate General. Among the company was 
the noble Duke and Duchess of Garternee ; the Earl and 
Countess of Anchorsheet, and Ladies FitzfTuke (2); Field- 
Marshal Count Schlaghintern ; the Ban of Lithuania ; the 
Way wode of Bosnia ; the Hospodar of Thrace ; the new 
Bishop of Yellowback Island, West Indies, the Mac Kit of 
that ilk in full Highland costume, with a dirk in his stocking 
worth five hundred pounds — having come to Mrs. Plover's 
straight from the anniversary of the Tossancaber Highland 
Association, where he danced more strathspeys on the table, 
emptied more mulls of snuff, and drank more glasses of whisky 
than I care to name. Then there was Chibouck Pasha, in a 
tight frock-coat like that of an inspector of police, but with a 
blister of diamonds on his breast, a red cap, and a gorgeous 
beard. 

There was Mr. Vatican O'Pkocleide, M.P. for Barrybugle, 
Ireland, who had a slight dispute with the Hansom cabman 
who brought him to Toppletoton Street, and threatened to 
inflict personal chastisement on Berkely Montmorency, 
Mrs. P.'s sergeant-footman, for not rightly announcing his 
style and titles. There was old General Halberts, who 
served in the Prussian army at Leipsic, who was about sixty 
years of age when that battle was fought, but is about fifty- 
one or two now, has very black hair and whiskers and 
mustachoes, but being rather shaky and tremulous (not with 

* Nous avcms change tout ea — will say my Eussian friends, who have 
so improved in civilisation within the last two years, that happening to turn 
over the leaves of a book called the "Journey due North " the other day 
at a stall — [the "Journey" was marked eightpence] — I thought I was 
reading the narrative of a nightmare. 



190 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

age, of course), got nervous at the great confusion of carriages 
at the top of the street, and chose to dismount and walk to 
402 (a), whereby he became entangled between one of Mr. 
Bunter's pastry-cook's men, and Ludovico Scartafaccio from 
Modena ( with his orchestra on wheels, drawn by a pony of a 
Modenese cast of countenance), and unluckily hooked himself 
on to an area railing by his diamond-hilted sabre, and the 
collar of the Golden Fleece, from which unpleasant position he 
was at length extricated by policeman P. 95, and Silver Sam, 
the link-boy. 

Finally, to mention a few more notabilities, there was 
Bohwanie-Lall, from Calcutta, a being strongly resembling a 
cocoa-nut candle swathed in a pair of white muslin curtains, 
bound round with bell-ropes of diamonds, pearls, and emeralds, 
and surmounted by a toupee of birds-of-paradise feathers. 
There was the author of the last new novel, and the last 
new painter, and the last new preacher, and the last new 
lion of whatever shape or degree he might be. There 
was Professor Oxalicacides, from Breslau, who, in his lectures 
on hygiene lately, gravely hinted his suspicions that the English 
sweet-stuff makers adulterated Everton toffee with sugar of 
lead and aqua t of ana. There was Madame Sostenuta, and 
Mademoiselle Orphea Sospianti, and Signor Portamento from 
the Italian Opera, engaged to sing professionally ; and with 
them Herr Bompazek, the great German basso, with a voice 
from the tombs, and hair dreadfully long and dishevelled. 
There were battalions of grand old dowagers in various stages 
of velvet and satin, more or less airy. There were frigid 
chaperons, so awful in their impressiveness that they seemed 
to possess the capacity of doing the office of Medusa's head 
for you at once. There were anxious mammas ; and 
simpering young dandies in colossal white neckcloths, and 
feet so tiny as to endanger their centre of gravity, and to 
render their tumbling over in the midst of a quadrille anything 
but unlikely. There were flushed-faced old papas. There 
was Jullien's band ; and there were cohorts, Pyrrhic phalanxes, 
of the dear English girls, the forms, the faces, the bright eyes, 
the red lips, the laughing lips that I will defy you to match — 
Mademoiselle Eulalie, or Signora Bianca, or Fraulein Trud- 
schen, or Donna Inez, or Sudarinia Nadiezda, or Khanoum 
Haidee, Gulnare, or Dudu, any summer or winter's day the 
whole year through. And so, through the noise of the night 
season, the Hon. Mrs. Plover's soiree dansante proceeded, 



DAYBREAK. 191 

How many quadrilles, and polkas, valses a deux temps, Scliot- 
tisches and mazurkas there were. How the ' lamps shone o'er 
fair women and brave men ;' how i a thousand hearts beat 
"happily, 5 and 'eyes looked love to eyes which spoke again ; 7 
how hands were squeezed in conservatories, and soft nothings 
whispered in balconies ; how crushed white roses were ravished 
from unresisting Sabines by impetuous dragoons, and tulle 
ribbons purloined by Cupid-struck undergraduates of the 
University of Oxford, tell, philosopher in the ill-washed neck- 
cloth and the dress-coat, to whose appearance candle-light 
was a decided advantage — philosopher, too awkward to dance, 
too timid to play whist, too moody to do aught else save 
lounge against doorposts and observe. How Lord Claude 
Pettitoes proposed (over strawberry ice) to Mrs. Vanilla, the 
Cuban widow ; how rude General Halberts made a dash at a 
model of Osier's crystal fountain in barley-sugar, and ate the 
fluted column up bodily. How Chibouck Pacha quaffed cham- 
pagne till his face shone again ; and Lady Blanche Pettitoes 
(sister of Lord Claude and daughter of the Marchioness of 
Dayryfedde) complained to her mamma, that he, the Pacha, 
squeezed her; how Mr. Eemanet, M.P., insisted on talking 
agricultural statistics to his partner ; how the various lions — 
literary, artistic, and scientific — howled, roared, and were 
stirred up with poles of different lengths and were trotted 
out in different corners of the different salons. How dancing 
commenced again after supper ; how Mrs. Plover was here, 
there, and everywhere, with a smile for everybody and 
a frown for nobody, save that sad fellow the member for 
Barry bugle, who tried to get a circle together in the boudoir, 
to discuss the wrongs of Ireland. How Bohwanie Lall from 
Calcutta, being strictly of the Brahminical persuasion, rigidly 
refused to partake of supper with unbelievers, and was served 
with a light repast of pistachio nuts and water-ice in an 
adjoining apartment, — though my private opinion is that he 
subsequently devoured a trayfull of real patties on the stair- 
case. How the professional singers sang like syrens, and 
Herr Bompazek shook the very chandeliers with his sepul- 
chral tones. How all these things were done, tell, fashionable 
Muse of soirees dansantes, if, Muse, thou wert honoured with a 
card for Mrs. Plover's, which I was not ! 

When daybreak came at last, how garish the yellow candle- 
light looked against the strong beams of the morning, the 
stalwart workers, the early-to-bed goers, and early risers. 



192 GASLIGHT AXD DAYLIGHT. 

How they beat down the nickering wax-ends in their sockets. 
And the pretty girls — pretty still — yet looking pale, and a 
trifle draggled, and a thought sickly. There was a faint 
odour through the crowded rooms of faded roses and spilt 
perfumes, and spent champagne corks. The Honourable 
Mrs. Plover's soiree was over. Slowly down the grand stair- 
case came the company, looking, if I may be permitted the 
use of vulgarism, ' seedy.' Slowly the yawning footmen 
opened the carriage-doors, and the sleepy horses clattered off. 
This was break of day — the day the grubs have to earn their 
daily bread by — and it was time for the butterflies to be in 
bed. 



XVIII. 

ARCADIA* 

Arcadia ! — what a nice place it must have been to be sure ! 
A perpetual pic-nic, without wasps or thunder-storms, and with 
nothing to pay. A smiling landscape, all gently undulating 
— no fierce rocks or yawning chasms. Banks on which wild 
thyme and violets continually grow. Eternal summer. Fruits, 
flowers, and odoriferous herbs. Innocent flocks of more inno- 
cent sheeplings ; soft, mild, benignant, undesigning bleat ers 
with dainty coats of whitest wool, hanging in worsted ringlets, 
unsmirched by the red ochre or cinnabar of mercenary grazier ; 
yet when the sun rises or sets, gleaming with iris tints from 
Nature's prism, making of each a mutton-rainbow — like Mr. 
Hunt's sheep in his picture of Our English Coasts. And then 
the shepherds with their long hair confined by an azure ribbon ; 
their abundance of clean linen, and guilelessness of braces ; 
their silken hose, and shoon with purple heels ; their harmless 
sports consisting in shooting at a stuffed bird on a highly 
decorated Maypole with a cross-bow bedecked with ribbons. 
And the shepherdesses, with auburn tresses and wide-spread- 
ino' straw hats, with golden crooks, and wreaths of flowers, and 
petticoats of gold and silk and satin brocade. Arid the old 
women — the Dorcases and Cicelys — dear old dames with 
silvery hair, scarlet cloaks, and ebony crutch-sticks ; but who 
never" scolded, oh no, nor had the rheumatism, nor groaned 
about their precious bones and the badness of the times. 
There were no Game Laws in Arcadia, no union workhouses, 
no beer-shops, no tally-men, no police. There were balls every 



xiRCADIA. 193 

and all day long in Arcadia ; endless country dances. No 
shepherd beat another shepherd or shepherdess with his crook, 
or a poker, or pewter-pot ; for there was no quarrelling — save 
here and there a trifle of bickering, a transient fugacious 
jealousy when Celia detected Corydon kissing of Phyllis, or if 
Sacharissa in a pet broke Damon's pipe. But these fleeting 
differences would soon be reconciled : all would kiss and be 
friends : and banquets to re-united friendship would take place 
in cool grottoes on carpets of fair flowers ; the viands (fruits, 
syllabubs, and cakes of finest flour), cooled by murmuring, 
rippling, pebbly, sparkling streamlets, and by fragrant boughs 
outside the cave, drooping with foliage and luscious fruit, and 
waved by the pitying summer breeze ; sheltering the grotto's 
inmates from the burly Sun's too bold salute. And the sky 
was very blue, and the birds sang carols continually. 

Yet, though the golden age be gone, and there are no more 
picturesque shepherds or shepherdesses, save in the canvasses 
of ^Watteau and Laneret, Arcadia still exists. It lives in the 
very heart of London. 

The prototype of the London arcade was, undoubtedly, the 
Oriental Bazaar. There is not a town in Turkey or Hindostan, 
without some dirty, stifling, covered passage, both sides of 
which overflow with amphitheatres of knick-knackery for sale. 
The Bezesteen of Stamboul is a genuine arcade, with all the 
crowding and confusion, the kaleidoscopic arrangement and 
gossip-bargaining of the Arcadia of England. 

The French, who manage so many things better than we our- 
selves do, and not a few so much worse, have long had an Ar- 
cadia of their own. As a special measure of relief for their legion- 
ary flaneurs or street-pacers — driven, in wet weather, from the 
much-sauntered-over Boulevards — there were devised the un- 
rivalled galleries and passages which are the delight of Paris, 
the admiration of strangers, and the bread-winners of unnum- 
bered artificers, factors, and retailers of those heterogeneous 
odds and ends known as articles de Paris. To the Passage de 
I' Opera, des Panoramas, du Saumon, Jouffroy ; from the Galeries 
Vivienne, Colbert, and Yero-Dodat ; the caricatures of Gavarni 
and Grandville, the classic lithographs of Jullien, the novels 
of Paul de Kock, the statuettes of Danton, and the ballads of 
Mademoiselle Eloisa Puget owe their chief celebrity. Beneath 
those glass roofs literary and artistic reputations have been 
won and lost. 

Milan followed in the wake of Paris, and the city of the Duomo 

o 



194 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

coasts many plate-glass-adorned and knick-knack-crowded 
covered thoroughfares. Vienna and Berlin followed; hut 
England knew not arcades before the present century. Some 
inventive genius accomplished a great feat in conjunction with 
certain shopkeepers and the Cork and Burlington estates. He 
brought Arcadia into Piccadilly, and built the Burlington 
Arcade. 

At first the shops of this Arcade were small and dark. They 
sold no articles of positive necessity : the useful arts were 
repellent to Burlingtonian notions of industry: and luxury 
was almost exclusively purveyed for. Burlington (as became 
a comital godfather) was intensely aristocratic. Boots and 
shoes and gloves were certainly sold ; but they fitted only the 
most Byronically small and symmetrical hands and feet ; none 
but the finest and most odoriferous leathers were employed in 
their confection, and none but the highest prices charged for 
them. The staple manufactures of this Arcade have been in 
turns jewellery, fans, feathers, French novels, pictorial albums, 
annuals, scrap-books, caricatures, harps, accordions, quadrille 
music, illuminated polkas, toys, scents, hair-brushes, odorife- 
rous vinegar, Eowlands' Macassar Oil, zephyr paletots, snuff- 
boxes, jewelled whips, clouded canes, lemon-coloured gloves, 
and false whiskers. Scarcely a fashionable vice, an aristocratic 
frivolity, or a Belgravian caprice, but had (and has) a repre- 
sentative in the Burlington Arcade. It was a little Yanity 
Fair. I have walked it many and many a time for years, 
thinking of John Bunyan, and wondering which was Britain 
Eow and Portugal Row. 

There was but one active handicraft exercised in the Arcade, 
and that was hair-cutting. The handicraftsmen cut your hair 
in sophisticated saloons, decorated with fallacious mural paint- 
ings of impossible Grecian landscapes, with, flaming Greeks 
and Turks fighting. Below they inveigled you to buy drugs 
and potions wherewith to dye the gray hairs you should be 
proud of, blue black ; and stuffs to make you emulate the 
smell of the civet, or the musk rat, and hogs' lard condimented 
into bears' grease, and wigs; — woven lies made from dead 
men's hair to thatch live fools. Further on, there were boots 
to pinch feet, corsets to tighten waists, and gloves to cramp 
hands. Boys with bundles were rigidly excluded from the 
precincts. Smoking was not allowed through its length or 
breadth. It was paraded by padded, tight-booted, tight- 
girthed, wigged old beaus striving to look like boys of twenty ; 



ARCADIA. 195 

by boys aping the vices of old men ; by carpet warriors, and 
by knights fresh from Almack tournaments. 

The department of Arcadia to which I have just (and it may 
seem to you rather harshly) alluded, has not been free from 
the vicissitudes, humiliations, and mutabilities common to 
buildings and thoroughfares, as well as to men. Yet, on the 
whole, it may be said that the- Burlingtonians have been a 
prosperous and well-to-do community. If Burlington had ap- 
pealed to the wisdom, learning, good taste ; or to the scientific 
or philosophic tendencies of humanity, it might have been 
bankrupt long ago, and its traders gone barefoot. But Bur- 
lington has calculated, like the quack doctor, that of every fifty 
passers-by forty are fools. With. Eobert Macaire it has studied 
the immortal axiom delivered by that sage to Bertrand, ' The 
day passes, but the fools remain ; and has occupied itself with 
what is co-existent with the world and with humanity — human 
folly. But for such customers, the booths in Vanity Fair, 
wherever its tents be pitched, would drive a poor trade indeed. 
I will leave the Province of Burlington, and direct my 
attention to that of Exeter. One was of comital rank ; but 
this is the fief of a marquisate. A word as to its antecedents. 
Where now stands the street that forms the approach to 
Eennie's magnificent bridge — the Bridge of Waterloo ; the 
bridge of gorgeous sunset views — the Bridge of Sighs — the 
Eialto of transpontine theatricals, industrials of the New Cut, 
Elephant and Castle omnibuses, and women without names, 
without hope, without lives (save a certain dog-like existence), 
there stood, before I was born, certain dingy brick houses. 
One of them was the old office of the old (and now dead) 
1 Courier ' newspaper ; and many may be old enough to remem- 
ber the bulletin of the great victory of Waterloo being pasted 
up on the ' Courier ' windows on the 21st of June, 1815. Another 
was the old Lyceum Theatre ; a third was Mr. Day's trunk- 
shop. Close beside these buildings, stood two mighty ele- 
phants' tusks- and a burly Beefeater, directing the eager sight- 
seer, the impatient country cousin, the enthusiastic holiday- 
maker, to the Museum or Menagerie of Wild Animals, known 
throughout the United Kingdom as Crosse's Wild Beast Show. 
Here had the lord of ' aitches ' and the Patent Theatres — the 
great John Philip Kemble — borrowed of Mr. Crosse the rhino- 
ceros on which he took his ever-memorable ride through 
Co vent Garden Market — in t\e early morning, when the sun 
was bright, and saloop-stalls were yet about — as dignified as a 

o 2 



196 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lord, playing the fool as only wise men can. Here had the 
howlings of unnumbered savage brutes, the rugged Eussian 
bear, the armed rhinoceros, like the Hyrcanian beast, shook 
the bricks of Exeter Change. Ye spotted snakes, ye dwelt 
there ; hyenas, ye have laughed; jackals, ye have wept 
deceivingly ; blue-faced monkeys, ye have shown your ceru- 
lean visages in those byegone Arcadian precincts. Here the 
" White Milliner," supposed to have been the Duchess of Tyr- 
connel fallen upon evil days, sold ribbons and gauzes. There 
held out against the united forces of Apothecaries' Hall and His 
Majesty's foot-guards Chunee, unconquered of refractory ele- 
phants. There he laughed at pounds of calomel and bales of 
drugs, and shook his sides with elephantine scorn at guns and 
pistols ; till the great, embrowned regulation muskets of His 
Majesty's foot-guards cracked his leviathan skin and let his 
giant life out. Crosse's must have been an exhibition. Why 
wasn't I alive when Exeter Change was extant, and the admis- 
sion ' up stairs ' one shilling, or under ? 

But Arcadia was fated to come again ; and Exeter Change, 
though it retains its name, has changed its locale, and is no 
more what it was. It is a changed change. It had a transi- 
tion state — a sort of chrysalis -like grubhood as a bad bazaar — 
a very bad and lame imitation of those Margate and Eamsgate, 
and general watering-place knick-knack shops, where there 
are countless assemblages of trifles, unconsidered, because really 
useless, and where you may, perhaps, (if you have great good 
luck) win, after the investment of from seven to fifteen shillings, 
such a prize as a German silver pencil-case, or a tea-pot stand 
of plaited rushes. And then Exeter Change became a wilder- 
ness of bricks and mortar, scaffold-poles, hods, ladders and 
ropes, and it and its neighbourhood went mad on the building 
question, after which and (up to 1853) ultimately, the Change 
changed its site, and burst on the world as an arcade — an 
Arcade of desolation, silence, despair. 

What can I compare it to? The street of the tombs at 
Pompeii — the Via Sacra with all the shops shut up and half 
a dozen funerals of Sextus Quintilius Somebody winding their 
way through its mournful lengths? A street in Tripoli or 
Algiers at mid-day when the sun is very hot and the plague 
is very bad about ? The ' dark entry ' in Canterbury Cathedral 
Yard multiplied by two ? Lawrence Pountney Hill (about the 
dreariest of thoroughfares I know) of a Sunday afternoon? 
Anything, anywhere, in any climate, country, age, or circum- 



ARCADIA. 197 

stance that is gloomy, dismal, heart-depressing, unventilated, 
graveyard-smelling — dull. This gloomy avenue leads from 
one and into another of the merriest London streets you 
would wish to find : one the bustling Catherine Street with 
its noisy News Exchange, and Old Druiy (though to be sure 
that is not so very gay) at the top ; the other the lively 
Wellington Street, embellished as it is with one of the most 
abusive cab-stands in the metropolis, and the sprightly 
Lyceum Theatre. But the Arcade is so dull. Some ghastly 
artist undertook, on its construction, to decorate it with mural 
arabesques. He has succeeded in filling the spaces between 
the shop-windows with some skeleton figures ; - - dripping, 
faded funerealities. These { arabesques ; (' mauresques ' would 
be more appropriate, for they are very mortuary) twist them- 
selves into horrible skeleton presentments, all in a leaden, 
deadened, dusky tone of colour : and, high over gas-lamps, 
and grimly clambering about shop-fronts, are melancholy 
dolphins and writhing serpents, and attenuated birds of 
paradise : all looking intensely wretched at the positions in 
which they find themselves. Likewise there are scrolls, 
which the Furies might twist in their hair ; and leaves which 
seem ready to drop off for very deadness, and sepulchral 
headings, and ego'-and-toncme fillets like rows of coffin nails. 

And are there shops in this Arcadia ? There are. - And are 
these shops tenanted ? Well ; they are tenanted : but not- 
much. A great many of the shops have had occupants ; but 
somehow or other the occupiers are continually vacating. 
They never stopped. Doubtless they had many good and 
sufficient reasons for so persistently continuing not to remain. 
They went abroad, relinquished business, made their fortunes 
— perhaps. I can remember in this changing Change, house 
and estate agents, servants' registry offices, coal-mine offices 
(with neat little hampers of Wallsend in the window — a 
novelty which would answer well, I opine, with a horse- 
dealer, if he were to put a few pasterns and fetlocks and a 
horse-shoe or two in his window), booksellers, newsvenclers 
and publishers (news and publicity here !), cigar-shops, tailors 
and habit-makers, milliners, dressmakers, and bonnet-builders, 
architects and surveyors, and a toy-shop : that didn't last. 
The drums and trumpets, the miniature guns and swords 
sounded and wielded there must have been of the same soil: 
as those used at Napoleon's midnight review : the Tombolas 
must have had death's heads ; the Jacks must have sprung, 



198 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

not of boxes, but of sarcophagi ; the kaleidoscopes must have 
shown nothing but prismatic goblins ; the accordions played 
nothing but the Dead March in Saul. 

I knew a French bookseller who established himself in 
Exeter Arcadia, with his wife and olive-branches round him, 
vainly thinking to live by vending the lively nouvellettes and 
vaudevilles of the Land of the Gaul. But his little children 
pined among the brumous shades of the 'Cade, and sighed, 
like Mary Queen of Scots, for the fair land of France again — ■ 
so the Frenchman vamosed. I also knew a confident foreigner 
who came here in the Exhibition year of '51, with two stools, 
a desk, and a Nugent's dictionary, on a vague 'speculation of 
interpreting, translating for, or verbally assisting foreigners 
visiting London during the Exhibition season. ' Informations- 
Bureau ' he called his shop, if I am not mistaken. But, as he 
spoke no English, and nobody came to make any inquiries 
who spoke any foreign language, his bureau came to nothing, 
and he vamosed, too. 

Desolate, dreary, weary, as any grange with any number of 
moats, art thou, Arcadia of Exeter ! Yet there is hope for 
thee. i Hope comes to all,' says Milton, and may I live to see 
the day when thy shops shall overflow with merchandise, 
when thy outlets shall be blocked up with customers, when 
thy fame shall be spread among the nations, and excursion 
trains start from the uttermost ends of the earth to visit thee. 
Till then, farewell, or be, as heretofore, a desert — not howling, 
for there are no wild animals to howl in thee — an empty 
sepulchre, a deserted wine-cellar, an abandoned quarry, an 
exhausted coal-mine, a ruined temple, or ' Ninny's Tomb,' 
meet only for the nocturnal rendezvous of some Pyramus of 
the Strand with some Thisbe of Adam Street, Adelphi ; be 
anything thou listest for, of a verity, Exeter, I (and, doubt- 
less, my readers) am weary of thee. 

The Lowther Arcade — I seek not to disguise it under any 
plausible incognito, for I am proud of it— is a tube of shops 
running from St. Martin's Churchyard into the Strand, very 
nearly opposite Hungerford Market. There is, frequently, 
very much noise in this tube as in that far-famed one across 
the Menai Straits that Mr. Stephenson built ; and there are 
collisions and signals — but here my railroad similes end ; for, 
in lieu of being a pitch-dark colour with grim iron-ribbed 
sides, with a flooring of slippery rails on which huge locomo- 
tive dragons with many jointed tails of carriages glide, this 



ARCADIA. 199 

tube is light and airy, and roofed with glass. It is noisy ; 
but not with the screaming and snorting, and panting of 
engines, the rattling of wheels, and the jangling of chains : it 
is resonant with the pattering of feet, the humming of voices, 
the laughter of children, the rustling of silken dresses, and 
buying, selling, bargaining, and chaffering. 

The commodities vended in the Lowther Arcade I may 
classify under three heads : Toys, Jewellery, and Minor Utili- 
ties, about each of which I have a word to say. 

Imprimis of toys. Enormous, preposterous, marvellous is 
Lowther in respect of toys. She possesses amphitheatres, 
rows upon rows, galleries upon galleries; Great Pyramids 
of Egypt, Great Towers of Belus, Great Tuns of Heidelberg, 
Great Beds of Ware, Great Dragons of Wantley, Giant Helmets 
of Otranto — of what ? Of toys. Birmingham is the toyshop 
of Europe ; Blair's Preceptor and Pinnock's Treasury of Know- 
ledge say it is. But no : Lowther is. Look around, if you 
are sceptical, upon the toys of all nations, and for children of 
all ages, which give children such exquisite delight in playing 
with them — which give papa and mamma delight scarcely less 
exquisite in buying them. Cosmopolitan toys, too. Look at 
the honest, hearty, well-meaning toys of old England. The 
famous cockhorses of such high blood and mettle, that the 
blood has broken out all over their skins in an eruption of 
crimson spots; so full of spirit that their manes stand bolt 
upright, and their tales project like comets ; such high and 
mighty cockhorses, that they disdain to walk, and take con- 
tinual carriage exercise on wooden platforms, running on 
wheels. The millers' carts, so bravely painted, so full of 
snowy sacks, supposed to contain best boulted flour ; but, in 
reality, holding sawdust. The carriers' carts, the mail phaetons, 
the block-tin omnibuses, the deal locomotives with woolly 
steam rushing from the funnels, the brewers' drays, and those 
simple, yet interesting, vehicles of plain white deal — exact 
models, in fact, of the London scavengers' carts — so much in 
request at Brighton and Margate for the cartage of sand, 
pebbles, and sea-weed, and sometimes used as hearses for the 
interment of a doll, or as Bath chairs for the exercise of an 
unwilling poodle. 

Can you look unmoved, although you he a philosopher and 
your name Zeno, Plato, or Socrates, on the great ISoah's arks 
— those Edens of wooden zoology, where the mouse lies down 
with the cameleopard (and is nearly as big), where the lion is 



200 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

on such familiar terms with the jackass as to allow him to 
stand atop of him, with his hoofs in his jagged mane ; where 
the duck is neatly packed (for more commodious stowage) in 
the bosom of the tigress, and then stands on his head between 
the fore feet of the elephant ? Can you passively inspect the 
noble fluffy donkeys, with real fur, and the nicely equipoised 
panniers, and harness of softest, brownest leather ? And those 
desirable family mansions, the dolls' houses, with the capital 
modern furniture, plate, glass and linen, with commands to 
sell which Messrs. Musgrove and Gadsden are not likely to be 
honoured. And the glorious kitchens, with that bottle-jack 
and meat screen and dripping-pan, at which was roasted the 
wooden sirloin of beef, painted and varnished. The boxes of 
red-handled carpenters' tools, which cut, and sawed, and 
chiselled nothing but children's fingers. The boxes of tea- 
things — now of wood, now of more ambition, tin and lead. 
The dolls — from Missey's flaxen-headed beauty, with the 
moveable blue eyes and the elegant pink leather extremities, 
swathed in silver tissue paper, to Master Jackey's favourite 
policeman, A. 1, very blue in attire, and very stiff, with a very 
glazed hat, an intensely legible number, and varnished wooden 
boots. The fierce Hungarian hussar on horseback, with that 
cruel curved wire and counter-weight stuck through his en- 
trails, with which he maintains an unceasing see-saw. The 
drummer with moveable arms. The musical toys, the accor- 
dions, the marvellous kaleidoscopes regarded at first as phan- 
tasmagoria of delight ; but, breaking, or being broken, soon 
disclosing to our great disappointment and disgust, nothing 
but a disc of tin, a fragment of smoked glass, and some tawdry 
coloured chips ? And such is life. 

Hoops, nine-pins, drums covered with real parchment, in- 
nocently white above, but which, were you to tear them, and 
look at the underparfc, would, I gage, be found to be fragments 
of old deeds and indentures — such is life again : French toys, 
fierce toys, warlike toys, smelling of Young France, and glory, 
and blood — such as miniature cannon, lancers, sabretasches;, 
war steamers armed en flute, sabres, muskets, shakos, and tri- 
coloured flags surmounted by the resuscitated Eagle of France. 
German toys, which like everything else coming from Deutsch- 
land, are somewhat quaint, and somewhat eccentric, and a 
thought misty : for example, queer old carved men and 
women, in queer attitudes, and animals whose anatomy is 
likewise of the queerest kind, and who yet have a queer ex- 



ARCADIA. 201 

pression of life and animation about them. Tortuous games, 
played with hammers and dice, and bells, and little men, 
which remind you somehow, you know not why, of Ehine 
Schlosses, and Gnomes and Undine, and Albert Diirer's mailed 
knights. Then the Germans have monks and hermits who 
open, like the dolls' houses cupboard-door fashion, and show 
you (where gentlemen are generally supposed to accommodate 
— well, there is no harm in it — their insides) little chapels 
and oratories, with little altars and candles and priests. And 
who but the Germans too, would make long panoramas and dio- 
ramas opening in the accordion and collapsing manner, and 
strange monsters in boxes? An infinity of oikei jou-joux, such 
as India-rubber balls, whips of all shapes and capacities for 
chair or cock-horse flagellation, skipping-ropes, flutes, spades, 
rakes and hoes : all these are to be found in the toy depart- 
ment of the Lowther Arcade. 

These toys are sold by bright-eyed damsels, and they are 
bought by plump married couples, and pretty cousins, and 
prim yet benignant old aunts, and cross yet kind old grand- 
mothers — yea and by cross-grained bachelors and sulky myso- 
gynists, and crabbed City men. I have seen a man — one of 
those men who were he but five-and-twenty you would 
immediately feel inclined to call, mentally, an old fellow — 
enter Lowther Arcadia by the Strand, looking as savage, as 
ill-tempered, as sulky as the defendant in a breach-of-promise 
case, dragging rather than leading a child ; but I have seen 
him emerge ten minutes afterwards with an armful of toys 
looking sunny with good humour. 

And they are bought, these toys, for that marvellous little 
people who are the delight and hope and joy, the sorrow, 
solace, chief anxiety, and chief pleasure, of grown-up man 
and womankind ; — for those little manuscripts of the book of 
life yet unsent to press, unset up in stern uncompromising 
type, as yet uncirculating in proof-sheets for the inspection 
of the judge : to be bound and published and criticised at the 
last ; — for those innocent little instruments of even-handed 
justice — the justice that makes of our children the chief 
punishment or reward to us — a heaven or a torment about us 
here in life. And whether Arcadia live or die, and whether 
those ruddy children and these plump parents continue or 
surcease, there will be toy-shops and toys and parents and 
children to purchase them to the end, I hope : for I believe 
toys to be the symbolic insignia of the freemasonry of child- 



202 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

hood — as aprons and mallets, adzes and jewels are to the 
older freemasons of Lincoln's-Inn Fields — and that they are 
bonds of union, pledges of affection, from the man-child to 
the child-man ; and that they are substantial lectures on use- 
ful arts and useful recreations ; and although of course I 
would exclude from my Tommy's or Emily's play-box every 
toy that could suggest or hint at cruelty, intolerance, injustice 
or wrong, I do think that English toys (I speak not of the 
Gallic and bellicose ones) are mainly honest and well- 
meaning, and even moral playthings. I love toys. 

The second department of Lowther Arcadia of which I 
would wish, cursorily, to treat, is that connected with the 
sale of jewellery. The Lowther bijouterie is certainly unique. 
It may want the intrinsic value of the productions of Howell 
and James or Hunt and Koskell. The Lowtherian brilliants 
may not be of a water so fine as those of Eegent Street or 
Cornhill ; but the jewellery of my Arcade is as sparkling and 
as showy, as gay and as variegated, as any assemblage of gems 
you like to mention — the jewel-house in the Tower of Lon- 
don, or the Queen of Spain's jewels, or Mr. Hope's. The gold 
is as yellow ; though, perhaps, not quite so valuable as any 
Brown and Wingrove have to refine. The emeralds are green, 
the rubies red, the turquoises blue : and what other colours 
would you have emeralds, and rubies, and turquoises to be? 
Lowther shines, too, in cameos — none of your shrinking, 
shamefaced, genuine Eoman ones — but great, bold, bouncing, 
pictorial pancakes : heads of Minerva as big as Bristol Channel 
oysters, and trios of Graces vying in size with bread-and- 
butter plates. Lowther hath, in its huge glass cases and 
beneath glass domes, good store of necklaces (the pearl ones 
like strings of varnished plovers' eggs), bracelets, agraffes, 
buckles, shirt-pins, hair ornaments ; but it is in the article of 
brooches that she chiefly shines : brooches with a vengeance. 
Geological brooches, comprising every variety of strata, from 
blue clay to red sandstone, genteelly cut, polished, and set. 
Pictorial brooches, forcing on you the counterfeit present- 
ments of a heterogeneous assemblage of celebrated female 
characters: Mary Queen of Scots, Madame de la Valliere, 
Marie Antoinette, and Jenny Lind ; with a more cautious 
selection from among the gentlemen, ranging from Oliver 
Cromwell to Buffon the naturalist, or from Henry the Eighth 
to M. Kossuth. Brooches for hair, and simple jet or cornelian 
brooches. Landscape brooches, where the lake of Chamouni, 



ARCADIA. 203 

and Mont Blanc — the monarch, of mountains, who was 
crowned so long ago — are depicted in a vivid blue and green 
manner — astonishing to the eyes of Professor Forbes, or 3Ir. 
Brockedon. Brooches for all ages, from that blushing girl of 
eighteen yonder — for whom the fond youth in the astonishing 
coat and the alarming waistcoat is purchasing a gigantic oval 
half-length of Charles the Second set in elaborate filigree — 
down to the white-headed old grandmamma, doubly widowed 
and doubly childless, who will here provide herself with a 
cheap yet handsome locket-brooch wherein to preserve a lock 
of sunny brown hair, all that is left fsave a ciphering book) 
to remind her of that gallant nephew Harry, who went down 
in the war-steamer 'Phlegethon, 1 with all hands, far in the 
Southern Seas. 

Nor is it the worse for being unreal — sham is hardly the 
word ; for Lowther says boldly. •' Here is my jewellery ; I will 
sell it to you at a price. If you choose to believe my half- 
crown cameo-moons are made of green cheese, my eighteen- 
penny bracelets sapphires or opals, my three-and-sixpenny 
necklaces barbaric pearl and gold, believe and be blest. We 
do not attempt to deceive you ; if our price be too cheap, don't 
buy/ It may seem inconsistent in me. who have so lately 
borne rather hard upon the arcade of Burlington, that I should 
defend the fictitious gems that have their abode in the arc 
of Lowther. But I consider this : that there is a difference 
between a sham deliberate, a wilful sophistry or wanton piece 
of casuistry, and a lie confessant : a work of fiction for in- 
stance — a novel, a fable, or a pleasant tale. As such, I 
consider the jewels of Lowther. Is it because my pretty 
tradesman's daughter, my humble milliner or sempstress ; 
even my comely cook, h; I. or damsel of all work can- 

not afford the real barbaric pearl and gold — the real rose and 
table diamonds — that they are to be debarred from wearing 
innocent adornments, wherewith to accomplish the captiva- 
tion ('which their bright faces have begun; of their respective 
swains and sweethearts ? So. Leaving their aristocratic 
si-ters to disport themselves in real Caskrneres from Lelhi and 
Allahabad, and real lace shawls from Brussels and Malines, 
they are content with humble Paisleys, and unobtrusive 
Greenocks ; so. abandoning genuine precious stones, genuine 
guinea gold, genuine pearls and cameos, to perhaps not the 
happiest, but at least the more fortunate of their sex, they 
shall revel as it pleases them in the eighteenpenny finery of 



204 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

this Arcadia ; and Samuel or William walking ' along with 
them/ or ' keeping of 'em company ' in the smartest of sur- 
touts and the whitest of Berlin gloves, on crowded steam- 
boats, or amid the velvetty glades of the metropolitan parks, 
shall be as proud of them and of their jewels as though they 
were duchesses. 

One more department of Arcadia yet remains to be ex- 
plored. This is the section devoted to what I may call minor 
utilities, and though minor, they occupy a very considerable 
portion of the Lowther Arcade. Heaped in wild confusion — > 
though not worse confounded — on the estrades of half a dozen 
merchants, are different ranges of shelves ; grades on grades 
of such articles as cakes of Windsor soap, shaving dishes, 
shaving brushes, pocket combs, snuffer trays, bronze candle- 
sticks, lucifer boxes, pipe lights, sealing wax; hair, tooth, 
clothes, and blacking brushes, French coffee-pots, tea canis- 
ters, workboxes, nutmeg graters, paper weights, pencil-cases, 
china mantel-shelf ornaments, knick-knacks for drawing-room 
tables, artificial flowers, watch-chains, perfumery, hair pins, 
plaster statuettes, penknives, scissors, dog-chains, walking- 
sticks, housewife-cases, knives, forks, and spoons, china plates, 
cups and saucers, wine glasses, decanters, presents from 
Brighton, tokens from Eamsgate, letter-clips, portfolios, music- 
cases, reticules, scent-bottles, and fans. There is scarcely a 
minor want, an everyday wish in the catalogue of everyday 
wants and wishes, but which can be supplied from the delight- 
fully egregious farrago of fancy hucksteries here collected. It 
is the Bagdad of housekeeping odds and ends, the very place 
I should advise all those about to marry to visit when they 
have found that besides the household furniture, plate, linen, 
and bedding, pots, pans, they have discovered indispensable 
in fitting up their bridal mansion, there are yet a thousand 
and one things they cannot do without, and which nothing 
but a walk through Arcadia will satisfy them that they really 
want. 

The most wonderful thing connected with the cosmopolitan 
merchandise displayed in the Lowther Arcade, is the apparent 
recklessness with which the commodities are exposed to the 
touch of the passers-by, and the enormous apparent confidence 
which their proprietors appear to place in their customers. 
The toys are tested, and the minor utilities examined ; the 
musical instruments are sounded at the good pleasure of those 
without, whether they mean buying or not buying ; but be 



ARCADIA. 205 

assured, man of sin — pilferer of small wares and petty 
larcener — that there is an eye within keenly glancing from 
some loophole contrived between accordions and tin breast- 
plates that watches your every movement, and is ' fly,' — to 
use a term peculiarly comprehensible to dishonest minds— to 
the slightest gesture of illegal conveyancing. 

The Lowther Arcade should, to be properly appreciated 
and admired, be viewed at three widely distant periods of the 
day. First, in the early morning, when the bells of St. Mar- 
tin's have just commenced carilloning the quarter-chimes to 
eight. Then the myriad wares that Lowther has to sell, are 
scattered about in a manner reminding you of the parti- 
coloured chaos of one of the Lowther's own kaleidoscopes 
indefinitely magnified and blown to pieces, or of the wardrobe 
and property room of a large theatre combined, when the 
employes are ' taking stock.' In the midst of this chaotic olla 
podrida of oddities pick their way, with cautious steps yet 
nimble, the Arcadian shepherds and shepherdesses, wearing 
mostly over their pastoral garments large aprons and pina- 
fores of brown holland and gray calico. With feather brooms 
or gauzy dusters they dust and cleanse and furbish aud rub 
up and brighten all the multifarious paraphernalia of their 
calling ; and, swift the amphitheatrical benches or grades are 
crowned with rainbow toys, or glittering glass cases sym- 
metrically arranged, artistically displayed to catch the eye 
and provoke the appetite of taste. Some pilgrim from the 
west may, at such times, fortuitously be found gliding among 
the fancy goods that corruscate the pavement, nervously 
apprehensive of stepping an inch to the right or to the left, 
lest he should ' fall into a bit of property,' his own might not 
be sufficient to replace. 

I have no room for statistics, so I will not enter into any 
calculation as to the numerical quantities of fancy wares 
vended in the Lowther Arcade ; the gross amount of money 
received, the average number of visitors, or matters of that 
kind. I may passingly observe, that there are toys, and gems, 
and knick-knacks here, that are things of great price to-day, 
and positive drugs in the market to-morrow. At one time the 
public toy-taste runs upon monkeys that run up sticks, or old 
gentlemen that swing by their own door-knockers, squeaking 
dreadfully the while : at another period the rage is for the 
squeezeable comic masks and faces (at first and fallaciously 
supposed to be made of gutta-percha, but ultimately dis 



206 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

covered, through the agency of a precocious philosopher, aged 
seven — who ate one of them — to be formed from a composi- 
tion of glue, flour, and treacle). Now, horrible writhing 
gutta-percha snakes are up, and now they are down; now 
pop-guns go off and now hang fire. 

There are certain toys and fancy ornaments that always, 
however, preserve a healthy vogue, and command a ready 
sale. Of the former, the Noah's arks, and dolls' houses, and 
India-rubber balls, may be mentioned ; although their no- 
minal nomenclatures are sometimes altered to suit the exi- 
gencies of fashion. Thus we are enticed to purchase Uncle 
Buncle's Noah's ark, Peter Parley's balls, or Jenny Lind's 
Doll's mansion. Of the fancy goods, I may hint fugitively 
that some attenuated vases of artificial flowers under glass 
shades, I have known as Queen Adelaide's Own, Victoria's 
Wreath, The Jenny Lind Bouquet, and the Eugenie Vase. 
These flowerets are much cultivated as chimney ornaments 
by maiden ladies in the neighbourhoods of Peckham Sise and 
Muswell Hills. Lastly, there is a model, or sample piece of 
workmanship, of which copies are to this day sold, principally 
to the ladies, which I have known for nearly twenty years. 
It consists of a hollow cottage of latitudinarian architecture, 
composed of plaster of Paris, with stained glass windows, and 
with a practicable chimney. In the hollow part of the edifice 
an oil lamp is nocturnally placed ; and the light pouring 
through the windows, and the smoke curling up the chimney 
(not altogether inodorously), produce a charming and pic- 
turesque effect. This building has had many names. When 
I knew it first, it was, I think, William Tell's Chalet. Then 
it was the Birthplace of the Poet Moore. Then it was Shak- 
speare's House. Then Her Majesty's Highland Hut or Shiel- 
ing, near Balmoral, in Scotland. And now it is the Birth- 
place of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. House of many names ! 
farewell ! and thou, too, Arcadia ! till at some future day I 
wander through thy spangled glades again. 



XIX. 

TEAVELS IN CAWDOR STREET. 

To the unobservant peripatetic, Cawdor Street is merely a 
thoroughfare, leading from Soho to Oxford Street, just as the 



TRAVELS IN CAWDOR STREET. 207 

4 "Venus de Medici ' would be the stone figure of a lady," and 
nothing more, and the ' Transfiguration ' of Baphael simply so 
much canvas, covered with so much paint. To the ordinary 
street-lounger, even Cawdor Street can only offer a few musty 
shops, filled with ancient furniture ; half a dozen dingy hook- 
stalls, some brokers' shops, and a score or more receptacles for 
cloudy-looking oil pictures in tarnished frames. 

And, perhaps, this is the most sensible way of looking, not 
only at Cawdor Street, but at things generally. "Why the 
plague should we always be making painful and blue-looking 
anatomical preparations, when we should be satisfied with the 
nice, wholesome-looking, superficial cuticle ? Why should we 
insist on rubbing the plating off our dishes and sugar-basins, 
and on showing the garish, ungenteel-looking copper beneath ? 
Why should we lift up the corner of the show and pry out 
who pulls Punch's legs, and causes Shallabalah to leap ? Why 
can't we take Cawdor Street, its old curiosity-shops, brokers, 
book-stalls, and picture-dealers, the world generally, for 
granted ? 

"We ought to do so, perhaps; but we can't. I am sure 
that I" cannot. Cawdor Street is to me a fearful and wonderful 
country to be explored. There are mysteries in Cawdor 
Street to be unravelled, curiosities of custom and language to 
be descanted on, causes to be ascertained, and effects to be 
deduced. Though from eight to ten minutes' moderately 
rapid exercise of the legs with which Nature has provided 
you would suffice to carry you from one end of Cawdor Street 
to the other, I can sojourn for many hours in its mysterious 
precincts. I am an old traveller in Cawdor Street, and it 
may not be amiss to impart to you some of the discoveries I 
have made during these my travels. 

I will spare you the definition of the geographical boun- 
daries of Cawdor Street. I will be content with observing 
that its south-westerly extremity is within a hundred miles, 
as the newspapers say, of Princes Street, Soho. The climate 
jaaay, on the whole, be described as muggy; fogs appear to 
have a facility in getting in, and a difficulty of getting out of 
it. The coy and reserved Scotch mist, and the bolder and 
more prononce pelting snow, linger pertinaciously on its pave- 
ments ; and when it is muddy in Cawdor Street — it is muddy. 

Cawdor Street has public-houses, and butchers' shops, and 
dining-rooms, as other streets have. It has the same floating 
population of ragged children, policemen, apple-women, and 



208 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

domestic animals. The inhabitants, I have reason to believe, 
pay rent and taxes : cabalistic metallic plates point out the 
distance of the fire-plug from the foot-pavement; and the 
banners of Barclay and Perkins, conjointly with those of 
Combe and Delafield, of Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton, and 
of Sir Henry Meux, hang out, as in other streets, upon the 
outward walls. 

The intelligent reader will, I dare say, by this time begin 
to ask, why, if Cawdor Street resembles, in so many points, 
hundreds of other streets, I should be at the trouble of 
describing it ? Patience ; and I will unfold all that Cawdor 
Street has of marvellous, and why it is worth travelling in. 
It is the seat of a great manufacture ; — not of cotton, as is 
Manchester the grimy and tall-chimneyed; — not of papier- 
mache, as is Birmingham the red-bricked and painfully-paved ; 
■ — not of lace, as is Nottingham the noisy and pugilistic, but of 
Art. Those well-meaning but simple-minded men who, two 
or three years since, set about making spoons and dishes, 
bread-baskets and cream-jugs, after artistic designs, and 
which they called art-manufactures, thought, in their single- 
heartedness, they had originated the term. Why, bless them! 
Cawdor Street has had extensive art-manufactures for scores 
of years. It has been manufacturing Art, artistic furniture, 
and artists to boot, almost since the time that Art came into 
England. 

For in Cawdor Street, be it understood, dwell the great 
tribe of manufacturers of spurious antiques, of sham moyen-age 
furniture, of fictitious Dresden china, of delusive Stradivarius 
violins. In Cawdor Street abide the mighty nation of picture- 
dealers, picture-forgers, picture ' clobberers,' picture-pawners, 
and other picture-traffickers, w^hose name is legion. In 
Cawdor Street are sellers of rare Rembrandt etchings, etched 
a, year ago; of autographs of Henry the Eighth, written a 
week since ; in Cawdor Street, finally, are gathered together 
(amongst many respectable and conscientious dealers) some 
rapacious gentry, who sell, as genuine, the things that are 
not, and never were ; who minister to the folly and credulity 
of the ignorant rich, on whom they fatten ; who hang on the 
outskirts of Art, seeking whom they may devour ; who are the 
curse of Art, and the bane of the artist. 

I often wonder what Eaphael Sanzio of Urbino, Gerretz 
van Ehyn, commonly called Eembrandt, Michael Angelo 
Buonarotti, and other professors of the art of painting would 



TRAVELS IX CAWDOR STREET. 209 

think, if, coming with a day-rule from the shades (Elysian, I 
trust), they could behold the daubs to which their names 
are appended. I often wonder how many hundred years it 
would have taken them to have painted, with their own 
hands, the multitudinous pictures which bear their names. 
Nay, if even the most celebrated of our living painters could 
see, gathered together, the whole of their ' original ' works 
which Cawdor Street dealers have to sell, they would, I 
opine, be sore astonished. Canvases they never touched, 
compositions they never dreamed of, effects of colour utterly 
unknown to them, would start before their astonished gaze. 
For every one white horse of AVouvermans. five hundred 
snowy steeds would paw the earth. For every drunken boor 
of Teniers, Ostade, or Adrien Brouwer, myriads of inebriated 
Hollanders would cumber Cawdor Street. Wonderful as were 
the facility and exuberance of production of Turner, the dead 
Academician would stare at the incalculable number of works 
imputed to him. Oh. Cawdor Street, thoroughfare of decep- 
tions and shams ! Oh, thou that sulliest bright mirrors with 
ignoble vapours ! thou art not deceitful, but deceit itself ! 

Here is the collection of ancient furniture, armour, old 
china, cameos, and other curiosities and articles of vertu, form- 
ing the stock in trade of Messrs. Melchior Saltabadil and Co. 
A magnificent assemblage of rare and curious articles they 
have, to be sure. Xot a dinted breastplate is there but has its 
appropriate legend ; not a carved ebony crucifix but has its 
romance ; not a broadsword or goblet of Bohemian glass but 
has its pedigree. That china monster belonged to the 
Empress 5laria Louisa ; that battered helmet was picked up 
on the field of Naseby ; that rusted iron box was the muni- 
ment-chest of the Abbey of Glastonbury ; that ivory-hafted 
dagger once hung at the side of David Eizzio ; and that long- 
broadsword was erst clasped by one of Cromwell's Ironsides. 
Come to the back of the shop, and Messrs. Melchior Saltabadil 
and Co. will be happy to show you a carved oak and velvet- 
covered prie-dieu once belonging to the oratory of Ann of Austria. 
That shirt of mail, yonder, hanging between the real Damascus 
sabre and the superb specimen of point lace, dates from the 
Crusades, and was worn by Eobin de Bobbinet at the siege of 
Acre. Step up stairs, and Melchior Saltabadil and Co. 
have some exquisite needlework for your inspection, of a date 
coeval with that of the Bayeux Tapestry. An astounding 
collection of curiosities have they, from worked altar-cloths, 



210 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and richly-stained glass of the fourteenth century, to Dresden 
shepherds and shepherdesses, and dazzling tea and dessert- 
. services of genuine Sevres china. 

Chasuble Cope, dealer in Ecclesiastical Antiquities, has his 
magasin just opposite to that of the before-mentioned mer- 
chants. Mr. Cope is great in altar-candlesticks, pyxes, rochets, 
faldstools, elaborately carved or brazen lecterns, mitres of 
the Middle Ages, illuminated missals, books of ' hours,' and 
other specimens of the paraphernalia of Romish ecclesiology. 
He has the skeleton of a mitred abbot in the cellar, and 
Bishop Blaise's crosier up stairs. Next door to him, the 
Cawdor Street traveller will find, perhaps, the copious and 
curious collection of Messrs. Ragoda and Son, who more 
specially affect Egyptian, Chinese, and Indian curiosities. 
Curiously-painted shells and fans, ivory concentric balls, 
wonderful porcelain idols, tear-bottles, bags of mummy 
wheat, carved Hindoo sceptres, brocaded draperies of astonish- 
ing antiquity — these form but a tithe of the Oriental relics 
detailed to view. Farther up Cawdor Street are establish- 
ments teeming with old furniture, and crowding the pave- 
ment with their overplus of carved chairs, and bulky tables 
with twisted legs, the boards of which glistened, in Harry 
the Eighth's time, with those sturdy flagons and long spiral- 
columned glasses now resting quietly on the dusty shelves ; 
and there are Queen Elizabethan cabinets, and stools on which 
Troubadours and Trouveres rested their harps when they sang 
the c Roman du Rou,' and the legend of King Arthur, in good- 
ness knows how many ' fy ttes.' There are small curiosity-mer- 
chants in Cawdor Street, as well as extensive ones ; humble 
dealers, whose stores resemble more the multifarious odcls-and- 
ends in brokers' shops than collections of antiquity and vertu. 
These bring home the savage tomahawk, the New Zealand 
boomerang, the rosary of carved beads, to the poorest door ; 
and render old armour, old furniture, old lace, and tapestry, 
comprehensible to the meanest understanding. 

And why should not all these be genuine — real, undoubted 
relics of ages gone by ? To the man of poetical imagination, 
what can be more pleasant than to wander through these 
dingy bazaars of the furniture, and armour, and knick- 
knackery of other days ? The sack, and malvoisie, and hypo- 
eras are gone ; but there are the flagons and beakers that held 
them. The mailed knights, and pious monks, have been dust 
these five hundred years; but there is their iron panoply, 



TRAVELS IN CAWDOR STREET. 211 

there are their hauberks, and two-handed swords ; there are 
the beads they counted, the roods before which they prayed, 
the holy volumes they were wont to read. Cromwell's name 
is but a noise ; but those ragged buff-boots may have enclosed 
his Protectorial extremities. The mattock, and the spade, and 
the earthworm have done their work with Diane de Poitiers 
and Gabrielle d'Estrees ; yet in that quaint Venetian mirror 
they may have dressed their shining locks, and mocked the 
glass with sunny glances. That should have been the Black 
Prince's surcoat ; that pearl and ivory box, the jewel-casket 
of IS inon de l'Enclos ; that savage club, carved, beaded, and 
ornamented with tufts of feathers, who shall say it was not 
wielded once by Montezuma, or was an heirloom in some far 
South American forest, ere Columbus was born, or Cortez and 
Pizarro heard of? Besides, are not the dealers in these 
curiosities respectable men ? Are not little labels affixed to 
some of the rarer articles, announcing them to have formed 
part of the Stowe collection, of that of Strawberry Hill, of 
Ponthill Abbey, of Lansdowne Tower — to have been bought 
of the Earl of Such-a-one's executors, or acquired at the Duke 
of So-and-so's sale? My friend, when you have travelled as 
long in Cawdor Street as I have, your poetical imaginings 
will have cooled down wofully ; and your faith in Oliver 
Cromwell's boots, Edward the Black Prince's surcoat, and Ninon 
de 1'Enclos's jewel-casket, will have decreased considerably. 
Some of the furniture is curious, and much of it old ; but, oh ! 
you have never heard, you have never seen (as I have) the 
art-manufactures that are carried on in Cawdor-Street garrets, 
in frowzy little courts, and mysterious back slums adjoining 
thereon. You do not know that wily armourers are at this 
moment forging new breastplates and helmets, which, being 
battered, and dinted, and rusted, shall assume the aspect of 
age — and ages. You do not know that, by cunning processes, 
new needlework can be made to look like old tapestry ; that 
the carved leg of an old chair, picked up in a dusty lumber- 
room, will suffice, to the Cawdor Street art-manufacturer as a 
matrix for the production of a whole set of carved, weather- 
stained, and worm-eaten furniture — chairs, tables, stools, side- 
boards, couches, and cabinets enough to furnish half a dozen 
houses of families of the Middle Ages, ' about to marry.' You 
have not heard that corpulent man in the fur cap, and with the 
pipe in his mouth — and who eyed you slily just now, as 
you were handling those curious silver-mounted pistols 

p 2 



212 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

— tell the swart artisan by his side that there is rather a run 
for inlaid Spanish crucifixes just now, and bid him make a 
dozen or two according to the model he gives him. How 
many of those Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses are of 
Saxon origin, think you? On how many of those squat, 
grinning, man3^-coloured Pagods did Indian sun ever shine ? 
The brie a brae shops of the Quai Voltaire, in Paris, swarm with 
spurious antiquities ; the dealers in antiques, in Eome, make 
harvests out of credulous c milords,' in the way of cameos, pro- 
duced at the rate of about two scudi, and sold at ten guineas 
each ; in fragments of marble urns, statues, and rilievi, pur- 
posely mutilated, buried in the environs of the Eternal City, 
and then dug up to be sold as ancient originals. How, then, 
should Cawdor Street be exempt from the suspicion of decep- 
tion ? — Cawdor Street, standing, as it does, in the midst of that 
land, and of that city, so bursting, so running over, with com- 
mercial competition, that, panting to do business at any price, 
it cannot refrain from vending counterfeit limbs, spurious gar- 
ments, sham victuals and drink even. The worst of it is, that 
knowing how many of the curiosities r and [rarities in these 
seeming shops are cunning deceits, a man is apt to grow 
sceptical as regards them all. For my part, I would rather, were 
I a collector of curiosities, rummage in old country public- 
houses (I would I could remember the whereabouts of that one 
where, as I live, I saw in the tap-room a genuine and a 
beautiful Vandyck, smoke-grimed and beer-stained !) or search 
in obscure brokers' shops, where, among rusty lanterns, beer- 
taps, bird-cages, flat-irons, fishing-rods, powder-flasks, and 
soiled portraits of Mrs. Billington in 'Mandane,' one does 
occasionally stumble on an undoubted relic of the past, and 
say, ' here is Truth.' 

But it is in the article of pictures that the art-manufacturers 
of Cawdor Street have astonished the world, and attained 
their present proud pre-eminence. Pictures are their delight, 
and form their greatest source of profit. Take, for example, 
the lion of Cawdor Street, the great Mr. Turps, ' Picture- 
dealer, liner, and restorer. Pictures bought, sold, or ex- 
changed. Noblemen and gentlemen waited upon at their 
own residences.' To look at Mr. Turps' shop, you would not 
augur much for the magnitude or value of his stock in trade. 
A small picture panel of a Dutch Boor, boosy, as usual, and 
bestriding a barrel of his beloved beer ; this and a big picture 
of some pink angels sprawling in, or rather on, an opaque 



TRAVELS IN CAWDOR STREET. 213 

sky; these are pretty nearly all that is visible above the 
wire-wove blinds which veil the penetralia of Mr. Turps' 
domicile. But only walk in — arrive well-dressed — come, 
above all, in a carriage— and the complaisant, the voluble 
Turps will show you stacks, mountains of pictures. He deals 
only in dead masters. He has nothing to say to the moderns. 
There is an original Sebastiano del Pionibo, formerly in the 
Orleans collection ; there a Madonna col Bambino of Baffaelle, 
which my Lord Bricabrac offered to cover with golden sove- 
reigns, would he, Turps, only sell it to him. There is the 
1 Brigand Eeposing,' by Salvator Eosa, formerly in the Bog- 
gotrotti Palace, and smuggled out of Eome in an extraordinary 
manner. The Prince Cardinal Boggotrotti, Turps tells you, 
had been prohibited by the Papal Government from selling 
any of his pictures ; but being deeply in debt, and wanting 
ready money sadly, he ceded to the importunities of the ad- 
venturous Turps, who purchased the picture ; but had another 
picture, ' St. Bartholomew, flayed alive,' painted over the 
original, in distemper. With this he triumphantly eluded 
discovery ; and though Saint Bartholomew's great toe was 
nearly rubbed out by a careless porter, he passed the Custom 
House and the Police, and brought his treasure to England. 
But here is a gem of gems, Turps' almost priceless picture — 
a little, old, shabby panel, on which you can discover some- 
thing dimly resembling a man's head, blinking through a 
dark -brown fog. This is the Eembrandt ' Three-quarter 
Portrait of the Burgomaster Tenbroeck,' painted in 1630. 
Wonderful picture ! wonderful ! 

I have a great respect for Mr. Turps (who has a pretty 
house at Stamford Hill, and can give you as good a glass of 
pale sherry, when he likes, as ever you would wish to taste) ; 
but I must tell the honest truth. The Sebastiano del Piombo 
was bought at Smith's sale, hard by, for three pounds seven ; 
and Turps knows no more who painted it, or where or when 
it was painted, than the Cham of Tartary does. The Boggo- 
trotti Eaffaelle was ' swop,' being bartered with little Mo 
Isaacs, of Jewin Street, for a "Wouvermans, a millboard study 
by Mortimer, and two glasses of brandy and water. As for 
the famous Eembrandt, Turps, in good sooth, had it painted 
himself on a panel taken from a mahogany chest of drawers he 
picked up cheap at a sale. He paid Young M'Gilp (attached 
to a portrait club, and not too proud to paint a sign occasion- 
ally,) just fifteen shillings for it; and a very good Eembrandt, 



214 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT, 

now it is tricked up and smoked down, it makes, as [times 

go- 

At the top of Mr. Turps' house lie has two large attics, 
where some half-dozen of his merry men manufacture pictures 
to order. According to the state of the market, and the 
demand for the works of particular painters, so do they turn 
out counterfeit Claudes, Murillos, Poussins, Fra Bartolomeos y 
Guidos, Guercinos, Giulio Komanos, Tenierses, Ostades, Ge- 
rard Dows, and Jan Steeris. If the pictures they forge (a 
hard word, but a true one) are on canvas, they are, on com- 
pletion, carefully lined so as to resemble old pictures restored ; 
if on panel, the wood is stained and corroded so as to denote 
antiquity. Little labels of numbers, bearing reference to sale 
catalogues, are carefully pasted on, and as carefully half torn 
off again. Sometimes the canvas is taken off the stretcher, 
and rolled backwards, so as to give it a cracked appearance ; 
anon, the panel is covered with a varnish, warranted to dry 
in a very network of ancient-looking cracks. Then the 
painting is tricked or ' clobbered ' with liquorice-water, and 
other artful mixtures and varnishes, which give it a clouded 
appearance. Chemical substances are purposely mixed with 
the colours to make them fade ; whites that dry yellow, and 
reds that turn brown. And then this picture, painted for the 
hire of a mechanic, is ready to be sold at a princely price to 
any British nobleman or gentleman who will buy it. Herein 
lies Mr. Turps' profit. The price of one picture will pay the 
expenses of his establishment for a twelvemonth, and leave 
him heavy in purse besides. His victims — well, never mind 
who they are — perhaps mostly recruited from the ranks of the 
vulgar with money, who purchase fine pictures as a necessary 
luxury, just as they buy fine clothes and carriages and horses. 
There are magnates of this class, who will absolutely buy 
pictures against each other ; Brown becoming frantic if Jones 
possess more Titians that he does ; Eobinson running neck 
and neck with Tomkins in Claudes, and beating him cleverly 
sometimes with a Canaletto. These competitions do good, you 
may believe me, to Mr. Turps, and bring considerable quantities 
of grist to his mill. From his extensive collection also are the 
4 original chef d'oeuvres of ancient masters,' which, from time to 
time, are brought to the auctioneer's hammer, both in private 
houses, and in public sale-rooms. The 4 property of a gentle- 
man, going abroad ;' the * collection of a nobleman, deceased ;' 
the 'gallery of an eminent amateur;' — all these Mr. Turps 



SSAYELS IX CAWDOB STREET. 215 

will supply at per dozen, and many score of his brethren in 
London are ready to do the same. 

that I wish to insinuate that there are no honest picture- 
dealers, and no bond fide picture auctions, in London. There 
are many — and there need be some, I am sure, to counteract 
the swarms of those which are impudent swindler:-. 

Of the same kindred as Mr. Turps, and having his abode in 
the same congenial Cawdor Street, you will find the well known 
Mr. Glaze, who turns his attention almost entirely to modern 
pictures. His art-manufactures consist of Turners, Ettys, 
Mulreadys. Landseers — in short, of all the favourite masters 
of the English school. He has a hand of artists, who. for 
stipends varying from a pound to thirty shillings weekly, 
produce counterfeits of the works of our Royal Academicians 
by the yard or mile. These forgeries have their sale principally 
on the Continent, where Engli.-h pictures (notwithstanding the 
doubts sometimes expressed by our neighbours as to whether we 
can paint at all j are eagerly sought after, and where a genuine 
Landseer is a pearl beyond price. Occasionally, though very 
rarely, Mr, Glaze buys original pictures by unknown artists — 
Snooks of Cleveland Street, perhaps, or Tibbs of Cirencester 
Place. He gives a few shillings for one — rarely half a sove- 
reign. Then, according to the genre, or to some faint analogy 
in style or colour, the name of some celebrated living master 
is. without further ceremony, clapped on the unresisting 
canvas, and as a 3Iulready, a Webster, or a Creswick, the 
daub goes forth to the world. 

Travelling jet through Cawdor Street, we come upon yet a 
lower grade of traffickers in pictures. These ingenious persons 
devote themselves to the art of picture-dealing, insofar as 
it affects pawnbroking. They employ artists (sometimes — 
daubers more frequently ) to paint pictures for a low but 
certain price. These occasionally they pawn, selling the 
tickets subsequently to the unwary for whatever they will 
fetch ; or, they buy tickets themselves, and remove them 
from one pawnbroker to another, who, as their knavish ex- 
perience teaches them, gives a better price for pictures. 
1 ^SLj Uncle,' however, it must be admitted, has grown rather 
wary lately with respect to pictures and picture-pawners. 
He has been ' done ' by apparent noblemen driving up to his 
door in carriages and pair, and by the footman bearing a care- 
fully-veiled picture into his private office , and telling him 
that ; my Lord' must have fifty pounds this evening. He has 



21G GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

been surfeited with pictures, new from the easel, painted by- 
necessitous artists in their extremity, and known in the trade 
as ' pot-boilers. 5 So that, now, he ' would rather not ' lend 
you anything on a picture ; and would prefer some more con- 
vertible article — say a flat-iron, or a pair of boots— to all the 
Titians or Eembrandts you could bring him. 

You might go on travelling up and down Cawdor Street for 
days, and find out some fresh proof of the deception and 
duplicity of this picture -dealing business at every step. It 
makes me melancholy to do so. And I think sometimes 
that not a few painters, who have had E.A. appended (and 
worthily) to their names, and have dined at the tables of live 
Dukes and Duchesses, may have thought of their old Cawdor 
Street days with a sort of tremor. More than one of them, I 
will be bound, as he has passed through Cawdor Street, has 
recognised an ancient master, or a modern original, in the 
painting of which he had a hand, and a considerable one, too. 
Our own Wilkie, we know, had no other employment for a 
long time save that of counterfeiting Tenierses and Ostades ; 
and he is not the only great painter who has done grinding- 
work for the picture-dealers, and who has travelled wearily 
and sorrowfully through Cawdor Street. 
Meanwhile, 

' The thane of Cawdor lives, 
A prosperous gentleman ! ' 



XX. 

HOUSES TO LET.* 

I have often heard conjectures hazarded, as to who and what 
manner of people they may be that read the Supplement of 
the ' Times ' newspaper. That a Yery fair proportion of the 
subscribers and readers of that journal do so, is a fact, I take 
it, apparent to, and acknowledged by, the frequenters of 
parlours, coffee-houses, club-rooms, and hotel snuggeries. 
Admitting always that it is read, it is not by any means so 
certain who reads it. The advertisers may do so, wishing, 
like careful men of business, to make sure that they have had 
their pennyworth for their penny. The proof reader reads it 

* This article was written before the abolition of the stamp duty on 
newspapers. There is now no supplement at all to the * Times'; the 
whole concrete mass of advertisements and news being sold as an aggre- 
gate for fourpence. 



HOUSES TO LET. 217 

bon gre, malgre, though, very likely, while toiling down the 
dreary columns of uninteresting announcements, he may say, 
with Ancient Pistol, in the Great Leek Consumption Case, — 
1 1 read and eke I swear. 5 But do you or I affect the perusal 
of that portentous broad-sheet. From time to time we may 
glance at the Education near London column ; at the New 
Discoveries in Teeth; at the Sales by Auction: and the 
Hoiizontal Grand Pianofortes : but we know that the really 
interesting 'ads.' are in the '.body of the paper; that the 
profligate initials are entreated to return to their parents, or 
to send back the key of the tea-caddy in the second or third 
column of the front page ; and that the unfathomable hiero- 
glyphics hold sweet converse in the same locality. In that 
Pactolean front page, who knows, from morning to morning, 
but that Messrs. Wouter, Gribble, and Sharp, of Gray's Inn, 
may publicly express their wish to communicate something to 
our advantage to us ? In that front page, conscientious cab- 
men have found the wearing apparel and jewellery we have 
lost, or dog-fanciers (more conscientious still) the dogs which 

have been st well, mislaid. In that same page we can 

put our hands on all the announcements we want : — the Steam 
Navigation, which is to waft us to Eotterdam and the Ehine, 
or to Paris, via Calais, in eleven hours ; of the exhibitions 
and dioramas we delight in witnessing; of the charitable 
associations it so pleaseth us (kind souls !) to subscribe to ; 
of horses and carriages, we buy or sell; of the commodious 
travelling-bags, replete with every necessaire de voyage, from a 
bootjack to a toothpick, which 3Ir. Fisher of the Strand ex- 
horts us to purchase ere we set out on the grand tour ; of Mr, 
Bennett's watches ; and 3Ir. Songster's umbrellas, and Mr. 
Tucker's lamps ; and of the oats, which good Mary Wed- 
lake so pertinaciously desires to know if we bruise yet. 
If we want clerks or governesses, or, as clerks and gover- 
nesses, are ourselves wanted ; if we wish to borrow or to 
lend money, or to see what new books or new music appeal 
to our taste, literary or musical, we find them, if not in the 
front page, still almost invariably in the main body of the 
' Times ; it is only on special occasions — when the ho- 
nourable Member for Mugborough divides the house at two 
o'clock in the morning ; or the Crushclod Agricultural Society 
holds a meeting, unusually stormy or lengthy ; or my Lord 
Centipede gives a dinner, at which everybody drinks every- 
body's health, and returns thanks into the bargain, — that the 



218 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHTo 

really interesting advertisements are crowded into the Supple- 
ment. On other occasions, that document remains a dreary 
acceptance for the education, teeth, pianoforte, and auctioneer 
advertisements, with the addition, perhaps, of a few camphine 
lamps, liquid hair-dyes, and coals at nine shillings per chal- 
dron. Yet the Supplement is read by thousands, — not merely 
by that pale man in the brown cloak and the discontented face 
opposite to me, w^ho has engaged the ' Times ' de facto after me, 
and is only, I can plainly see, affecting to read the de jure 
Supplement ; having rage in his heart, caused by the convic- 
tion (wherein he is right) that I intend to keep the paper till 
I have read the ' leaders ' through ;• — not merely by him, but by 
the numerous and influential class of persons who are inte- 
rested in a phalanx of advertisements, which I have hitherto 
omitted to enumerate, as among the contents of the dullest 
Supplement ; and which have reference to Houses to Let. 
This is, at least, my theory. If ever I see a man really 
mentally immersed in the perusal of the ' Times ' Supplement, 
and appearing to derive any genuine interest therefrom, I 
make pretty sure that he has either a House to Let, or that he 
wants to take one. 

Houses to Let ! The subject is fraught with speculative 
interest for those philosophers who are content to leave the 
sun, the moon, the pre-Adamite dynasties, the Mosaic theory of 
creation, the iEolic digamma, and the perpetual motion, to their 
betters; and can find sufficient food for philosophy in the 
odds and ends, the sweeping of the House of Life — who can 
read homilies in bricks and mortar, sermons in stones, the 
story of a life, its hopes and fears, its joys and woes, in the 
timbers of a dilapidated pigsty e, in the desolation of a choked- 
up fountain, or the ruins of a springless pump ! 

We change our dresses, our servants, our friends and foes — 
how can our houses expect to be exempt from the mutabilities 
of life ? We tire of the old friend, and incline to the new ; 
the old baby is deposed in favour of the new baby ; the fat, 
turnip silver watch our father gave us, gives place to a gold 
Geneva — we change, and swop, and barter, and give up, and 
take back, and long for, and get tired of, all and everything 
in life — why not of houses too ? So the Supplement of the 
'Times' can always offer Houses to Let ; and we are continually 
running mad to let or hire them, as vice versa, six months hence, 
perhaps we shall be as maniacally eager to hire or to let. 

Subdivision, classification, and elaboration, are certainly 



HOUSES TO- LET. 219 

distinguishing characteristics of the present aera of civilisation. 
The house-agents of the 'Daily Courant.'* of ihe 'Public Ledger,' 
or the -Evening Intelligencer.' would have been coupled with 
the announcement pur et simple, that in such and such a street, 
or part of the court, there was a House to Let. They might, 
perhaps, have added, at the most, that it was over-against the 
Bear Garden, or that it formerly belonged to a tradesman 
possessing an infallible cure for the scurvy, and who ' made 
the very best purle that ever was brewed:'* but there they 
would stop. Catch us doing anything of the son in these en- 
lightened days. Where our benighted grandfathers had boys' 
and girls* schools, we have seminaries, academies, lyceums, 
and colleges, for young ladies. Where they had sales • by 
inch of candle.' we had Mr. George Robins, and have now 
Messrs. Musgrove and Gadsden, and Frederick Jones, who 
are always being * honoured with instructions ' to sell things 
for us or to us. A spade isn't a spade in IS -5 9. but something 
else : and with our house-agents, a house is not only a house, 
but a great many things besides. 

A House to Let may be a mansion, a noble mansion, a 
family mansion, a residence, a desirable residence, a genteel 
residence, a family residence, a bachelors residence, a distin- 
guished residence, an elegant house, a substantial house, a 
detached house, a desirable villa, a semi-detached villa, a 
villa standing in its own grounds, an Italian villa, a villa-resi- 
dence, a small villa, a compact detached cottage, a cottage 
ornee^ and so on. almost ad infinitum. Earely do the advertise- 
ments bear reference only to a house, a villa, or a cottage : we 
must call the spade something in addition to its simply agra- 
rian title. 

Xow, are all these infinitesimal subdivisions of Houses to 
Let merely intended as ingenious devices to charm the house 
hirer by variety, in the manner of Mr, Xicoll. with regard to 
his overcoats, and 3Iessrs. Swan and Edgar with reference to 
ladies' cloaks and shawls ; or do there really exist subtle dis- 
tinctions, minute, yet decidedly perceptible, between every 
differently named house ? Can it be that the desirable 
residence has points calculated to satisfy desire in a different 
degree to the elegant predilections to be gratified by the 
elegant residence ? Can it be that a residence, after all. isn't 
a house, nor a house a residence ? It may be so. People, in 
the innocence of their hearts, and unaccustomed to letting or 
hiring houses, may imagine that there can be no very material 
difference between a villa, a genteel villa, and a compact 



220 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

villa ; but in the mind of the astute house-agent, and equally 
intelligent house-hirer, differences, varieties of size, aspect, 
and convenience, immediately suggest themselves ; and to their 
experienced eyes there are as many points of distinction 
between the genteel and the compact, the desirable and the 
distinguished, as to the visual organs of those learned in 
horses between a cob and a hack, a racer and a screw ; or 
to the initiated in dog-lore, between a greyhound and a setter. 

I do not pretend to any peculiarly nice perception as to 
things in general. I cannot tell to this day a hawk from a 
falcon (between the former bird and a handsaw I might be 
able to guess). It was a long time before I could distinguish 
between a leveret and a rabbit, or tell very high venison from 
decomposed shoulder of mutton ; and I will not be certain, 
even now, if I could tell from the odour (being blindfolded), 
which was pitch and which tar. So, the immense variety of 
Houses to Let has always been to me a mystery, the subtle 
distinctions in their nomenclature sources of perplexed specu- 
lation. There may be those who are more learned than I am 
- — those who, with similar acuteness as the gentlemen men- 
tioned in Hudibras, who had been beaten till they could tell 
to a splinter of what wood the cudgel was composed, and 
kicked till they knew if the shoe were 4 calfskin or neat's 
leather ' — can mark the strong connections, the nice depen- 
dencies, the gradations just of houses, mansions, villas, and 
residences, and with their ' pervading souls look through ' the 
wondrous variety of Houses to Let. 

I can only theorise. I have studied the ' Times ' attentively, 
and gazed wearily at the elongated crimson baize-covered 
panels in the house-agents' windows, on which, written on 
slips of foolscap, the announcements of Houses to Let are 
secured with parti-coloured wafers. Goodness knows how 
far from the actual mark I may be ; but you shall hear what 
my ideas are on this very open House question. 

First, of the Mansion. What manner of house would you 
imagine that to be ? I take it to be situate at Kew, possibly 
at Chiswick, peradventure at Putney. Bed brick, stone 
window casings, a great many chimney-pots, a steep flight of 
steps before the door. Perhaps the advertisement says that it 
is ' approached by a carriage drive.' I can see that carriage 
drive, the mangy gravel, weeds and grass springing up 
between ; the brown ragged lawn in the middle ; the choked- 
up flower-beds, with pieces of broken bottles and fractured 
tobacco-pipes, where once were geraniums, and heliotropes. 



HOUSES TO LET. 221 

There must be a wall in front, and a pair of rusty iron 
gates, or more probably a paint-destitute portal, scored over 
with drawings in crayons of unpopular churchwardens, and 
fierce denunciations of the Pope of Borae, the College of 
Cardinals, and the New Police Act. This door is blistered 
with the sun, dinted by the peg-tops and hockey-sticks of 
savage boj T s. Tn the centre you may see a parallelopipedal 
patch, where the paint is of a lighter colour, and where there 
are marks of bygone screws. That was where the brass plate 
was, when the mansion was occupied by the Eeverend Doctor 
Brushback. It was called ' Smolensko House ' then, and on 
Sundays and holidays a goodly procession of youths educated 
therein issued from it. A small confectioner's ('sock-shop,' 
the boys called it) was started in the adjacent lane, on the 
sole strength of the school custom ; and Widow Maggie, the 
greengrocer, who supplied the establishment with birch- 
brooms, actually started her boy Dick in a cart with a live 
donkey from her increased profits. But the Eeverend Doctor 
Brushback, at the age of fifty-seven, and in a most unaccount- 
able manner, took it into his head to turn the wife of his 
bosom out of doors. Then he flogged three-fourths of his 
scholars away, and starved the remainder. Then he was 
suspected of an addiction to strong drinks, and of breaking 
Leather's (the shoe, knife, and general errand boy's) head, 
because he could not tell him what was Greek for a boot-jack. 
Smolensko House speedily presented that most melancholy 
spectacle, a bankrupt school; and the last time I heard of 
Doctor Brushback, it was on a charge (unfounded, of course) 
at the Public Office, Bow Street, of being drunk and disor- 
derly in the gallery of Drury Lane Theatre. Was not our 
mansion, after this, Minerva House Finishing Academy for 
Young Ladies ? Surely so. The Misses Gimp devoted them- 
selves to the task of tuition with a high sense of its onerous 
duties, and strenuously endeavoured to combine careful ma- 
ternal supervision with the advantages of a finished system of 
polite education (vide ' Times')* But the neighbourhood was 
prejudiced against the scholastic profession, and the Misses 
Gimp found few scholars, and fewer friends. Subsequently, 
their crack scholar, Miss Mango, the heiress, eloped with Mr. 
De Lypey, professor of dancing, deportment, and calisthenics. 
The resident Parisienne married Mr. Tragacanth, assistant to 
Mr. Poppy ed, the chemist, and the Misses Gimp went to ruin 
or Boulogne. I lost sight of my mansion about here — for a 



222 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

time at least. It must, however, have been rented by Captain 
Vere de Vere Delamere, and his family, who paid nobody, 
and, owing innumerable quarters for rent, were eventually 
persuaded to remove by a bribe from the landlord. Or was 
the mansion ever in the occupation of the celebrated Mr. Nix, 
who said he belonged to the Stock Exchange, and removed in 
the midst of winter, and at the dead of night, taking with him, 
over and above his own furniture, a few marble mantel -pieces, 
register stoves, and other trifles in the way of fixtures ? Or 
was this mansion the one taken by Mr. Huffy, immensely 
rich, but very eccentric, who turned his nephews and nieces 
out of doors, painted all the windows a bright red, kept a 
tame hyaena, and persisted in standing outside his gate on 
Sunday mornings with nothing on, to speak of, save a leather 
apron and a meerschaum, assuring the public generally that 
he was Peter the Great ? 

I glance again at the advertisement, and fincl my mansion 
described as a ' noble ' one. In that case I should say it was 
in some nice, marshy, swampy, reedy part of Essex, where 
the owls scream, and the frogs croak blithely at night. There 
are two stone hawks sculptured above the gates ; a garden, as 
tangled and savage-looking as an Indian jungle ; a dried-up 
fountain ; and maimed, broken-nosed, mildewed statues, tot- 
tering on moss and weed-covered pedestals. In the old time, 
the Earl of Elbowsout lived at the ' noble ' mansion ; but his 
lordship afterwards resided in sunny Italy for many years, 
deriving immense benefit (not pecuniary, of course) from a 
judicious consumption of Professor Paracelsus's pills. He left 
an heir ; and whenever Inspector Beresford was wont to force 
open the door of some harmless house in Jermyn Street, with 
sledge hammers, you would be pretty sure to find, among the 
list of prisoners, conveyed to Vine Street, on a suspicion of 
indulging in the forbidden game of chicken -hazard, the names 
of Eobert Smith or of John Brown ; one of whom, you might 
have been as certain, was no other than Lord Viscount Hawker, 
his lordship's son. 

' Convenient Mansion,' says the 4 Times ' again. Ah ! I know, 
A big, square block of a house, very small windows, iron- 
barred, and a high wall inside. Just suitable for Doctor 
Mufnes's asylum for the insane ; plenty of cold water laid on. 
Very convenient ! — Family Mansion, Plenty of bed-rooms, 
high gate on the nursery-stairs, stables, coach-house, and 
detached room, for the gardener. — 'Picturesque Mansion.' 



HOUSES TO LET. 223 

Decidedly picturesque, but damp. Picturesque in propor- 
tion to its ruin, and out of all habitable repair. Thomas 
Hood wrote a beautiful poem once, of a Picturesque Mansion 
— A Haunted House — and which has haunted me ever since. 
The choked-up moat ; the obscene birds, that flapped their 
wings on the roof; the foul insects, that wove webs inside; 
the gaunt rats, that held unholy gambols in the kitchen ; 
the weed-grown courtyard, window-sills, and door-steps ; the 
damp feculence, dust, dirt, rust, about all or everything ; the 
one Sunbeam, coming through a grimed window, and illumi- 
nating a bloody hand. There had been a murder done there, 
and the house was haunted. I can well believe it. I, too, 
saw, once upon a time, a mansion, where a foul and wicked 
murder had been done. I saw labourers searching the muddy 
moat for the weapons of the assassins ; I was taken to see the 
corridor where the deed had been done ; and I followed the 
footsteps of the murderer through, mud and slush, snow and 
straw, from the mansion to the farm he lived at. I never read 
poor Hood's plaintive poem without thinking that Stanfield 
Hall — shut up, un-tenanted, moat-dried — would be a very 
counterpart, now, of the house he shadowed forth. 

Not, however, to forget Houses to Let. Shall I take the 
Bachelor's Eesidence ? An invisible hand points to Highgate 
— an inward feeling suggests Mitcham. / go for Crickle- 
wood : Kilburn is too near, and Edge ware too far ; but Crickle- 
wood holds a juste milieu between them. I can see the 
Bachelor's Eesidence — a pert, smart, snug, little habitation, 
standing alone, mostly; for your bachelor is incorrigible 
(steady or fast) with regard to musical instruments. Your 
fast bachelor will manage the Bedowa on the cornet-a-piston ; 
and your steady one, set ' Ah ! non grunge/ to hard labour on 
the flute — but all will practise ; and — should their bachelors' 
quarters happen to be supported, right and left, by family 
residences — the inhabitants of Acacia Terrace or Plantain 
Grove are apt to become remarkably disagreeable in their 
reclamations to the bachelor himself. The bachelor is a bank- 
clerk, very likely, or a stock-broker, not over-plethoric just 
yet with profits : or a young fellow with a small independence. 
He has a front garden and a back garden ; both, ten to one, 
provided with a trim little summer-house, where he is very 
fond of sitting on .fine afternoons with his friends, clad in 
bachelor-like deshabille, consuming the grateful beer of Bass, 
and gently whining the cutty-pipe of Milo, or the meerschaum. 



224 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

He has flowers, but has a faint idea that the tobacco-smoke 
does not do them any good. He has a housekeeper — generally 
middle-aged, and frequently deaf — many friends, more pipes, 
and frequently an anomalous kind of little vehicle, drawn by 
an eccentric pony, and which he calls his ' trap.' Sunday is 
his great day. All his fly-rods, fishing-tackle, gardening im- 
plements, guns, rabbit-hutches, and pipe-racks, are overhauled 
on that day ; grave judgments are passed on the dogs and 
horses of his friends ; and an impervious cloud of Bird's-eye 
or Oronooko hangs about the little summer-houses. But the 
bachelor marries ; goes a little too fast, perhaps, or dies (for, 
alas ! even bachelors must die) ; and so his Bachelor's Eesi- 
dence is To Let. 

The Desirable Eesidence. I have the secret of that ' House 
to Let,' I will be bound. A lodging-house ! What could 
there be more desirable, in the way of a residence, than that, 
I should like to know ? Twelve-roomed house, in Manchester 
Street, Manchester Square. Blue damask curtains in the first- 
floor windows; red ditto in the parlour windows; a never- 
disappearing placard, of Apartments Furnished (for however 
full the lodging-house may be, it always seems to have a 
marvellous capacity for holding more) ; and area railings, 
frequently enlivened and ornamented by the three-quarter 
portrait of a pretty servant maid. Whenever you see the 
butcher, or the baker, or the grocer's man, at the door of the 
Desirable Eesidence, you will be sure, if you watch, to see 
him produce a red account-book ; for people who keep lodging- 
houses invariably run bills with tradesmen, probably to give 
an air of veracity and colourable truth to the persevering 
assertion made to their lodgers, that they have a little bill to 
pay to-morrow. If the lady who keeps the Desirable Eesi- 
dence is married, you wi]l not be very far out, if you assert 
that her husband has something to do with the Docks, or that 
he is a barrister's clerk, in good practice. You can't be wroug, 
if you set him down as an indifferently-dressed man, with an 
umbrella, who, whenever he speaks to you, calls you ' Sir/ 
If your landlady should happen to be a widow, take my word 
for it, that ' she was not always in these circumstances ;' that 
her late husband's executors have used her shamefully ; and 
that she has a pretty daughter or niece. 

Unless I am very far out in my theory, the ' Substantial 
Eesidence ' is a lodging-house too, and the ' Genteel Eesidence ' 
not very far from it. Cecil Street, Strand, for the former, and 



HOUSES TO LET. 225 

Camberwell for the latter, would not be very wide of the 
mark. Cecil Street is full of substantial houses, in which 
lodgers, sometimes not quite so substantial as the houses, 
continually dwell. The prices of provisions are high in Cecil 
Street, and the quantity of nourishment they afford far from 
considerable. Penny loaves are twopence each, and you can't 
get more than one dinner off a leg of mutton. The profits 
arising from the avocations of the landladies of substantial 
residences must be so large, that I wonder they ever come 
to be advertised as ' to let ' at all. Perhaps it is that they 
make their fortunes, and migrate to the ' elegant residence,' 
or the ' distinguished residence.' 

Am I wrong in placing the locale of these two last species of 

* Houses to Let,' in Belgravia and Tyburnia? They may, 
after all, be wasting their elegance and their distinction in 
Golden Square, Ely Place, or Kennington Oval. Yet I am 
always coming across, and reading with great unction, 
paragraphs in the newspapers, setting forth that, ' after the 
marriage of Miss Arabella Constantia Tanner, daughter of 
Hyde Tanner, Esq., of the firm of Bender, Cooter, and Tanner, 
of Lombard Street, to the Honourable Captain Casey, son of 
Lord Latitat, the happy couple partook of a magnificent 
dejeuner at the elegant residence of the bride's father in Hyde 
Park Gardens ;' or else it is, that ' last evening the Earl and 
Countess of Hammersmith and Ladies Barnes (2), Sir John 
Bobcherry, Pillary Pacha, &c, <&c, honoured Sir Styles and 
Lady Springer with their company to dinner at their dis- 
tinguished residence in Eaton Place.' I can always imagine 
tall footmen, magnificent and serene in plush and embroidery, 
lolling at the doors of elegant and distinguished residences. I 
don't think I can be very far wrong. 1 reside, myself, over a 
milk-shop, and I know that to be neither an elegant nor a dis- 
tinguished residence ; but are there not both elegance and 
distinction in the stately Belgrave Square, and the lofty West- 
bourne Grove ? 

Coming, in the pursuit of this superficial examination of 

* Houses to Let,' I stop puzzled at the word ' House,' simple, 
unadulterated, unaccompanied with eulogy, or explanatory 
prefix. I have my theory about it, though it may be but a 
lame one. The lone, silent * House ' must be like that 
celebrated one at the corner of Stamford Street, Blackfriars, 
which, with its two companions, everybody has seen, and 
nobody knows the history of — a house unlet, unletable, yet 

Q 



226 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

always to let. Now, a house agent having any bowels what- 
soever, could not call this a desirable house, nor a convenient 
house, nor an elegant house So, being too good a man of 
business to call it an ill-favoured house, a dirty house, and a 
villanous house, as it is, he calls it a ' House. 5 A house it is, 
sure enough, just as a horse, albeit spavined, wind-galled, 
glandered, staggered, lame, blown, a kicker and a roarer, is a 
horse still. But what a horse, and what a house ! 

A ' Genteel House ' seems to me different to a genteel 
residence. The latter's use I have elsewhere hinted at; 
the former I take to be situate somewhere in Gower Street, 
Keppel Street, or Guildford Street, or in some of those 
mysterious thoroughfares you are always getting into when 
you don't want them, and never can find when you do. In 
the genteel house, I should think, two maiden ladies must 
have lived— sisters probably; say, the Miss Twills, whose 
father was Twills of Saint Mary- Axe, sugar-baker ; and whose 
brother, Mr. Twills, in partnership with Mr. Squills, can be 
found in Montague Place, Bedford Square, where the two carry 
on a genteel business as surgeons and apothecaries. The Miss 
Twills kept a one-horse fly (not one of your rakish-looking 
broughams, be it understood), with a corpulent horse (serious 
of disposition, and given to eating plum-cake when he could 
get it), and a mild-looking coachman, who carried a hymn- 
book in his pocket. One day, however, I surmise, Miss Jessy 
Twills, the youngest and prettiest sister (she did not mind 
owning to forty) married the Keverend Felix Spanker, of 
Saint Blazer's Chapel, in Milinan Street. Miss Betsy Twills 
went to live with her married sister (the two lead the poor 
parson a terrible life between them, and Felix is more irate 
in the pulpit against the Pope than ever), and the genteel 
residence took its place in the category of ' Houses to Let.' 

The ' Detached House ' bears its peculiar characteristic on 
its front ; it stands alone, and nothing more can be said about 
it; but with the 'semi-detached house' there is a subtle 
mystery, much to be marvelled at. Semi-detached ! Have 
the party-walls between two houses shrunk, or is there a 
bridge connecting the two, as in Mr. Beckford's house in 
Landsdown Crescent, Bath ? A semi-detached house may be 
a house with a field on one side and a bone-boiling factory on 
the other. Semi-detached may mean half-tumbling to pieces. 
I must inquire into it. 

The ' mansion,' the ' residence,' and the ' house/ seem to 



HOUSES TO LET. 227 

indicate dwellings of some considerable degree of impor- 
tance and extent; the i villa,' the 'cottage,' and the 'lodge,' 
seem to indicate smaller places of abode, though perhaps 
equalling, if not surpassing, their contemporaries in elegance, 
gentility, distinction, convenience, desirableness, substantiality, 
&c, &c. There is one thing, however, certain about the villa 
— one sound basis to go upon, which we do not possess as 
regards the ' house.' The ' house ' is ambiguously situated, it 
may be, in Grosvenor Square, in Pall Mall, or in Brick Lane, 
Spitalfields, or Crown Street, Seven Dials ; but the villa is 
necessarily suburban. You could not call a house (however 
small it might be) situated between a pie-shop and a public- 
house, a ' villa.' A four-roomed house in Fleet Street would 
be a novelty, and if you were to call it a Gothic lodge, would 
be a greater novelty still ; while Covent Garden Market, or 
Long Acre, wonld scarcely be the locale for a cottage ornee, or 
an Italian villa. I recognise cottages, villas, and lodges, with 
the addition of ' hermitages.' ' priories/ ' groves,' ' boxes,' 
'retreats,' &c, on all suburban roads; — in Kensington, 
Hammersmith, and Turnham Green ; in Kingsland, Hackney, 
and Dalston ; in Highgate, Hampstead, and Hornsey ; in 
Camber well, Peckham, and Kennington; in Paddington, 
Kilburn, and Cricklewood ; their roads, approaches, and 
environs, inclusive. And a fair proportion do these suburbs 
contribute to the ' Houses to Let ' in the Supplement of the 
' Times.' 

The i villa standing in its own grounds' is generally 
suggestive of stockbrokers. Great people are these stock- 
brokers for villas ; for driving mail-phaetons, or wide-awake 
looking dog-carts ; for giving capital dinners and wine. 
The young man who has a stockbroker for a friend, has 
need but to trouble himself only concerning his lodging 
and washing ; his board will take care of itself, or, rather, will 
be amply taken care of in the villa of his Amphitryon. Next, 
I should say, to a decided penchant for giving and taking the 
longest of odds, and a marked leaning towards the purchase 
and sale of horseflesh, hospitality is the most prominent charac- 
teristic of a stockbroker. He is always ' wanting to stand ' 
something. His bargains are made over sherry and sand- 
wiches ; he begins and ends the day with conviviality. What 
a pity it is that his speculations should fail sometimes, and 
that his clients should lose their money, and himself be ' sold 
up ' — ostracised from 'Change, driven to dwell among the tents 

Q 2 



228 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

of Boulogne-sur-Mer, or the cities of refuge of Belgium, the 
boorish and the beery ! Else would he be living in his own 
ground-surrounded villa to this day, instead of its being 
confided to the tender mercies of Messrs. Hammer and Bapps, 
auctioneers and house-agents, as a ' Villa to Let.' 

' An Italian Villa to Let.' Pretty, plausible, but deceptive. 
The house-agent who devised the Italian prefix was a hum- 
bug. Start not, reader, while I whisper in your ear. The 
Italian villa is a shabby little domicile, only,. Italian in so much 
as it possesses Venetian blinds. I know it ; for I, who speak, 
have been egregiously sold, lamentably taken in, by this 
mendacious villa. 

4 A Villa to Let,' again. Not elegant, desirable, distin- 
guished, nor Italian ; but a villa. It has bow- windows, I will 
go bail. A green verandah over the drawing-room window, for 
a trifle. Two bells, one for visitors, and' one for servants. The 
villa is suitable for Mr. Covin (of the firm of Feraud and 
Covin, solicitors), who has been importuned so long by Mrs. 
Covin to abandon his substantial residence in Bedford Bow, 
that he has at last acceded to her wishes. Covin is a portly 
man, with a thick gold chain, a bald head, and a fringe of 
black whisker. He is fond of a peculiarly fruity port, like 
black-currant jam diluted with treacle and water : and his 
wife's bonnet-box is a japanned tin-coffer, labelled ' Mr. 
Soldoff's estate.' He won't live in the villa long, because he 
will get tired of it, and long for Bedford Bow again, with its 
pleasant odour of new vellum and red tape. He will let it to 
Mr. Bunt, the barrister, in ' chamber ' practice, or Mr. Mus- 
covado, the sugar-broker of Tower Street, or Mrs. Lopp, the 
comfortably-circumstanced widow, who was so stanch a friend 
to the Beverend Silas Chowler; the same who, in imitation 
of the famous Mr. Huntingdon, S.S., called himself H.B.B., 
or Half-Burnt Brand. 

What should the 4 cottage ornee ' be like, I should wish to 
know (to jump from villas to cottages), but that delightful 
little box of a place at Dulwich, where a good friend of mine 
was wont (wont, alas !) to live. The strawberries in the 
garden; the private theatricals in the back parlour; the 
pleasant excursions on week clays to the old College — (God 
bless old Thomas Alleyne and Sir Francis Bourgeois, I say ! 
Had the former done nothing worthier of benediction in his 
life than found the dear old place, or the latter not atoned for 
all the execrably bad modern pictures he painted in his life- 



HOUSES TO LET. 229 

time, by the exquisitety beautiful ancient ones he left us at 
1 lis death) ; — the symposium in the garden on Sundays; the 
clear church-bells ringing through the soft summer air ; the 
pianoforte in the boudoir, and Giuck's ' Che faro senza Euri- 
dice?' lightly, gently elicited from the silvery keys (by 
hands that are cold and powerless now), wreathing through 
the open window ; the kind faces and cheerful laughter, the 
timid anxiety of the ladies concerning the last omnibus home 
at night, and the cheerful recklessness with which they sub- 
sequently abandoned that last omnibus to its fate, and con- 
jectured impossibly fortuitous conveyances to town, conjec- 
tures ultimately resolving themselves into impromptu beds. 
How many a time have I had a shake-down on the billiard- 
table of the cottage orne'e ? How many a time but my 

theme is of Houses to Let. 

And of ' Houses to Let/ I have been unconscionably gar- 
rulous, without being usefully communicative. I have said 
too much, and yet not half enough. In houses, I am yet at 
fault about the little mushroom-like rows of flimsy-looking 
tenements that spring up on every side in and about the 
suburbs ; in brick-fields, in patches of ground where rubbish 
was formerly shot, and vagabond boys turned over three 
times for a penny. I have yet to learn in what species 
of ' House to Let ' the eccentric gentleman formerly resided, 
who never washed himself for five-and -forty years, and 
was supposed to scrape himself with an oyster-shell after 
the manner of the Caribbees ; where it was, whether in a 
house, a villa, a residence, or a cottage, that the maiden lady 
entertained the fourteen torn cats, that slept each in a four- 
post bedstead, and were fed, all of them, on turtle soup. I 
want to know what ' every convenience ' means. I should 
like to have some further information as to what ' a select 
number ' actually implies. I am desirous of ascertaining in 
what category of ' Houses to Let ' a house-agent would rank a 
tenantless theatre, a chapel without a congregation or a mi- 
nister, an empty brewery, or a deserted powder-mill. 

Finally, I should like to know what a ' cottage ' is. Of the 
cottage orne'e I have spoken ; the compact cottage, the detached 
cottage, the semi-detached cottage, speak for themselves ; but 
I am as much puzzled about the simple cottage as about the 
simple house, mansion, or villa. In my youth I had a 
chimera of a cottage, and drew rude outlines thereof on a 
slate. It had quadrangular tiles, a window immediately 



230 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

above the door, palings at tlie side, and smoke continually 
issuing from the chimney. Its architecture was decidedly out 
of the perpendicular; afterwards, perusing works of a rural 
and pastoral description, a cottage became to me a little para- 
dise of ivy, and honeysuckles, and woodbine. It had a pretty 
porch, where a young lady in a quilted petticoat, and a young 
gentleman in a flapped waistcoat, both after the manner (and 
a very sweet one it is) of Mr. Frank Stone, made first and last 
appeals to each other all the year round. That was in the 
time of roses. The times have changed, and I, so I suppose, 
have changed with them. The roses that remain to us, 
brother, when our hair becomes inclined to the grizzly, we 
feel disposed to look commercially upon, and to make money 
of. Yes ; the fairest rose-leaves from Damascus's garden will 
we sell to Messrs. Piesse and Lubin for the making of attar ; 
even as Olympia, at sixty, sells the love-letters of her youth to 
Messrs Hotpress and Co, publishers, to make three volumes 
octavo of s memoirs.' I am sceptical, ignorant, undecided, 
about the cottage now. Sometimes it is the slate-pencil cot- 
tage, sometimes the Frank Stone one, sometimes the cottage 
of the sixpenny valentines, quitting which, by a bright yellow 
serpentine path, a gentleman in a blue coat, and a lady in 
a pink dress, wend their way to the altar of Hymen. Some- 
times, reader of mine ! I see other cottages, dreadful 
cottages, squalid cottages, cottages in Church Lane, Saint 
Giles's, where frowsy women in tattered shawls crouch 
stolidly on the door-step ; where ragged, filthy children wal- 
low with fowls and pigs amidst the dirt and squalor. Some- 
times I see cottages in my fondly pictured rural districts — 
cottages dilapidated, half unroofed, where gaunt agricultural 
labourers are sullenly wrangling with relieving-officers ; where 
white-headed, brick-dust faced children cry for bread ; where 
mother is down with the fever, and grandmother bedridden, 
yet querulously refusing to go into the dreaded ' House.' 

Perhaps I am wrong in all this. Perhaps all these theories 
about mansions, residences, houses, villas, and the inex- 
plicable cottages, after all may be but wild and improbable 
theories — crude, vague, purposeless speculations. But I have 
said my say, and shall be wiser some day, I hope, in other 
matters besides ' Houses to Let.' 



231 ) 



XXL 

TATTYBOYS RENTS. 

In Tattyboys Eents tlie sun shines, and the rain rains, and 
people are born, and live, and die, and are buried and for- 
gotten, much as they do in Eents of greater renown. And I 
do not think that the obscurity of the Tattyboysians, and the 
lack of fame of their residence, causes them much grief, 
simply because it is to be believed that they are unconscious 
of both fame and obscurity. That happy conformation of the 
human mind which leads us firmly and complacently to think 
that the whole world is ceaselessly occupied with our own 
little tinpot doings — that serenity of self-importance which 
lends such a dignity of carriage to little Mr. Claypipkin, as he 
sails down the street in company with big, burly Mr. Brazen- 
pot — these, I dare say, set my friends in the locality that 
gives a name to this paper, quite at their ease in regard to 
the place they occupy, in the estimation of the universe, and 
engender a comfortable indifference as to whether the eyes of 
Europe (that celebrated visionary) are continually fixed upon 
Tattyboys Eents or not. 

To tell the plain truth about them, nevertheless, the Eents 
and the Eenters are alarmingly obscure. Beyond the postman, 
the tax-collectors, and those miracles of topographical erudi- 
tion who deliver County Court summonses, and serve notices 
for the Insolvent Court, I doubt if there are a hundred persons 
in London, exclusive of the inhabitants themselves, who know 
anything about Tattyboys Eents, or even whereabouts they are. 
It is to be surmised that the names of the magnates of the Eents 
are inscribed in that golden book of commerce, the Post-Office 
London Directory, but the place itself finds no mention there. 
By internal evidence and much collation of the work in ques- 
tion, it maybe conjectured that Tattyboys Eents is not even the 
proper name of the score of houses so called, and that it is 
legally known — no, not known, for it isn't known — but that 
it should be designated as — Little Blitsom Street. Plugg, of 
the water-rates, says that in his youth he well remembers a 
small stone tablet on the corner wall of number nineteen, 
running thus, ' Little Blitsom Street, 1770/ — and old Mrs. 
Brush, the charwoman, who, in the days of King James the 
First, would iufallibly have been burnt for a witch, but is now 



232 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

venerated as the oldest inhabitant, minds the time ' when a 
ferocious band of miscreants,' whether forgers, burglars, or 
murderers, is not stated, were captured in Tattyboys Bents 
by that bold runner Townshend, and his red-waistcoated 
acolytes, and by him conveyed before Sir Eichard Birnie : 
the wretches being known as the ' Little Blitsom Street 
Gang.' Mogg's Map of the Metropolis, with the later charts 
of Eichard and Davis, passes the Eents by, in contemptuous 
silence. Blitsom Street and long, dirty Turk's Lane, into 
which it leads, are both set down in fair characters, but 
beyond a nameless little space between two blocks of houses^ 
there is nothing to tell you where Tattyboys Eents may be. 
It is no good asking the policeman anything about them. I 
have my doubts whether he knows ; but even granting 
his sapience, I have my suspicions that unless he knew your 
position and character well, he would affect entire ignorance 
on the subject. He has his private reasons for doing so. 
Tattyboys Eents are far too snugly situated, peaceable, and 
w T ell-behaved, for its locality to be divulged to strangers— 
possibly of indifferent character. Therefore my advice to 
you is, if you understand navigation, which I do not, to take 
your observations by the sun and moon, and, by the help of 
your ' Hamilton Moore,' chronometers, quadrant, compass 
steering due north, and a guinea case of mathematical instru- 
ments, work out Tattyboys Eents' exact place on the chart, — 
and then go and find it. Or, ' another way,' as the cookery- 
book says, follow Turk's Lane, till you come to Blitsom 
Street, up which wander till you stumble, somehow, into 
Tattyboys Eents. 

The last you are very likely to do literally, for the only 
approach to the Eents is by a flight of steps, very steep and 
very treacherous, their vicinity being masked by a grove of 
posts, and the half-dozen idlers whom you are always sure to 
find congregated round Chap ford's beershop. And it has 
often happened that, of the few strangers who have travelled 
in Tattyboys Eents, the proudest and sternest : men who 
would have scorned to perform the ceremony of the Kotou in 
China, and would have scouted the idea of salaaming to the 
Great Mogul : have made their first entrance into the Eents 
with the lowliest obeisances, with bended knees, and fore- 
heads touching the pavement. 

If Miss Mitford had not written, years ago, ■ Our Village/ 
it is decidedly by that name that I should have called this 



TATTYBOYS RENTS. 233 

paper. For, Tattyboys Eents form not only a village as 
regards their isolation, and the unsophisticated nature of 
their inhabitants, but they resemble those villages, few and 
far between, now-a-days, where there is no railway-station 
— cross-country villages, where the civilising shriek of the 
engine-whistle is never heard : where the building mania 
in any style of architecture is unfelt ; where the inhabitants 
keep themselves to themselves, and have a supreme contempt 
for the inhabitants of all other villages, hamlets, townships, 
and boroughs whatsoever; where strangers are barely tole- 
rated and never popular; where improvements, alterations, 
and innovations, are unanimously scouted ; where the father's 
customs are the son's rule of life, and the daughters do what 
their mothers did before them. The Metropolitan Buildings 
Act is a dead letter in Tattyboys Eents, lor nobody ever 
thinks of building — to say nothing of rebuilding or painting 
— a house. The Common Lodging-House Act goes for no- 
thing, for there are no common lodging-houses, and the lodgers, 
where there are any, are of an uncommon character. No one 
fears the Nuisances. Eemovals Act, for everybody has his own 
particular nuisance, and is too fond of it to move for its re- 
moval. The Health of Towns Act has nothing in common 
with the health of Tattyboys Eents, for fevers don't seem to 
trouble themselves to come down its steep entrance steps, and 
the cholera has, on three occasions, given it the cut direct. 
It is of no use bothering about the drainage, for nobody com- 
plains about it, and nobody will tell you whether it is deficient 
or not. As to the supply of water, there is a pump at the 
further extremity of the Eents that would satisfy the most 
exigent hydropathist ; and, touching that pump, I should like 
to see the bold stranger female who would dare to draw a 
jugful of water from it, or the stranger boy who would pre- 
sume to lift to his lips the time-worn and water-rusted iron 
ladle attached by a chain to that pump's nozzle. Such persons 
as district surveyors and inspectors of nuisances have been 
heard of in Tattyboys Eents, but they are estimated as being 
in influence and authority infinitely below the parish beadle. 
There was a chimney on fire once at number twelve, and with 
immense difficulty an engine was lifted into the Eents, but 
all claims of the Fire Bigrade were laughed to scorn, and the 
boys of the Eents made such a fierce attack on the engine, and 
manifested so keen a desire to detain it as a hostage, that the 
helmeted men with the hatchets were glad to make their 
escape as best they could. 



234 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

The first peculiarity that will strike yon on entering the 
Bents is the tallness of the houses. The blackness of their 
fronts and the dinginess of their windows will not appear to 
you as so uncommon, being a characteristic of Blitsom Street, 
Turk's Lane, and the whole of the neighbourhood. But, 
Tattyboys houses are very tall indeed, as if, being set so 
closely together, and being prevented by conservative ten- 
dencies from spreading beyond the limits of the Bents, they 
had grown taller instead, and added unto themselves storeys 
instead of wings. I can't say much, either, for their pictu- 
resque aspect. Old as the Bents are, they are not roman- 
tically old. Here are no lean-to roofs, no carved gables, 
no old lintels, no dormer or lattice windows. The houses 
are all alike — all tall, grimy, all with mathematical dirty 
windows, flights of steps (quite innocent of the modern 
frivolities of washing and hearthstoning), tall narrow doors, 
and areas with hideous railings. One uncompromisingly 
tasteless yet terrible mould was evidently made in the first 
instance for all the lion's-head knockers : one disproportioned 
spearhead and tassel for all the railings. I can imagine the 
first Tattyboys, a stern man of inflexible uniformity of con- 
duct and purpose, saying grimly to his builder : ' Build me a 
Bents of so many houses, on such and such a model,' and the 
obedient builder turning out so many houses like so many 
bricks, or so many bullets from a mould, or pins from a wire, 
and saying, £ There, Tattyboys, there are your Bents.' Then 
new, painted, swept, garnished, with the mathematical 
windows all glistening in one sunbeam, the same lion's-head 
knockers grinning on the same doors, the regularity of Tatty- 
boys Bents must have been distressing : the houses must all 
have been as like each other as the beaux in wigs and cocked 
hats, and the belles in hoops and hair powder, who lived 
when Tattyboys Bents were built : but age, poverty, and dirt 
have given as much variety of expression to these houses now, 
as hair, whiskers, wrinkles, and scars give to the human 
face. Some of the lion-headed knockers are gone, and 
many of the spear-headed railings. Some of the tall doors 
stand continually open, drooping gracefully on one hinge. 
The plain fronts of the houses are chequered by lively 
cartoons, pictorially representing the domestic mangle, the 
friendly cow that yields fresh milk daily for our nourishment, 
the household goods that can be removed (by spring vans) in 
town or country; the enlivening ginger-beer which is the 
favourite beverage (according to the cartoon) of the British 



TATTYEOYS KEXTS. 235 

Field-Marshal, and the lady in the Bloomer costume. Variety 
is given to the windows by many of their panes being broken, 
or patched with parti-coloured paper and textile fabrics ; and 
by many of the windows themselves being open the major part 
of the day, disclosing heads and shoulders of various stages of 
muscular development, with a foreground of tobacco-pipes 
and a background of shirt-sleeves. Pails, brooms, and multi- 
farious odds and ends, take away from the uniformity of the 
areas, while the area gates (where there are any left) swing 
cheerfully to and fro. Groups of laughing children be- 
spangle the pavement, and diversify the door-steps : and 
liveliness, colour, form, are given to the houses and the 
inhabitants by dirt, linen on poles, half-torn-off placards, 
domestic fowls, dogs, decayed vegetables, oyster tubs, pewter 
pots, broken shutters, torn blinds, ragged door-mats, lidless 
kettles, bottomless saucepans, shattered plates, bits of frayed 
rope, and cats whose race is run, and whose last tile has been 
squatted on. 

Tattyboys originally intended the houses in his Eents to be 
all private mansions. Of that there can be no doubt : else, 
why the areas, why the doorsteps and the lion-headed 
knockers ? But, that mutability of time and fashion which 
has converted the monastery of the Crutched Friars into a 
nest of sugar-brokers' counting-houses, and the Palace of 
Henry the Eighth and Cardinal Wolsey into a hair-dresser's 
shop, has dealt as hardly with the private houses in Tatty- 
boys Eents. The shopkeeping element has not yet wholly 
destroyed the aristocratic aspect of the place ; still, in veiy 
many instances, petty commerce has set up its petty wares in 
the front parlour windows, and the chapman has built his 
counters and shelves on the groundfloors of gentility. 

I have spoken so often of Tattyboys Bents, that the ques- 
tion might aptly be asked, Who was Tattyboys ? When did 
it occur to him to build Bents ? By what fortunate in- 
heritance, what adventitious accession of wealth, what pros- 
perous result of astute speculations, was he enabled to give 
his name to, and derive quarterly rents from, the two 
blocks of houses christened after him"? So dense is the 
obscurity that surrounds all the antecedents of the locality, 
that I do not even know the sex of the primary Tattyboys. 

The estates, titles, muniments, and manorial rights (what- 
ever they may be) of the clan Tattyboys, are at present en- 
joyed by a black beaver bonnet and black silk cloak of antedi- 
luvian design and antemundane rustiness, supposed to contain 



236 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Miss Tattyboys herself. I say supposed, for though the cloak 
and the bonnet are patent in the Kents on certain periodical 
occasions, the ancient female (she must be old) whom, they en- 
shroud is facially as unknown as the first Odalisque of the 
Harem to Hassan the cobler, or as the Veiled Prophet of 
Khorassan was to the meanest of his adorers. No man has 
seen Miss Tattyboys, not even Mr. Barwise, her ageni ; nay, 
nor old Mr. Fazzle, the immensely rich bachelor of number 
thirteen ; but many have heard her stern demands for rent, 
and her shrill denunciation of the ' carryings on ' of her 
tenants. It is said that Miss Tattyboys resides at Hoxton, and 
that she keeps her own cows. Men also say that she discounts 
bills, and is the proprietor of a weekly newspaper. It is 
certain that she is in frequent communication with Mr. Hemp, 
the officer of the Sheriffs' Court ; and many are the proclama- 
tions of outlawry made against sprigs of nobility, with tre- 
mendously long and aristocratic names at the ' suit of Bridget 
Tattyboys.' Likewise she arrested the Honourable Tom 
Scaley bridge, M.P., at the close of the last session, before 
the advent of the present administration, but was compelled, 
to release him immediately afterwards, he claiming his pri- 
vilege. There are many solicitors of my acquaintance, who 
in their mysteriously musty and monied private offices have 
battered tin boxes with half-effaced inscriptions relative to 
< Tattyboys Estate, 1829;' 'Tattyboys Trust, 1832;' i Tatty- 
boys versus Patcherly ;' and 'Miss Bridget Tattyboys.' She 
is mixed up with an infinity of trusts, estates, and will cases. 
She is the subject of dreary law-suits in which the nominal 
plaintiff is the real defendant, and the defendant ought not 
to be a party to the suit at all. Time is always being given to 
speak to her, or communicate with her, or to summons her to 
produce papers which she never will produce. Law reports 
about her cases begin with c So far back as eighteen hundred 
and ten; 5 . 'it will be remembered that; 5 'this part heard 
case ;' and the daily newspapers occasionally contain letters 
denying that she made a proposition to A., or sued B., or was 
indebted to C. : signed by Driver, Chizzle, and Wrench, solicitors 
for Miss Tattyboys. She got as far as the House of Lords 
once, in an appeal case against Coger Alley Earn Cunder Loll, 
of Bombay ; but how this litigious old female managed to get 
out, physically or literally, to Hindostan, or into difficulties 
with a Parsee indigo broker, passes my comprehension. A 
mysterious old lady. 

Meanwhile, Miss Bridget Tattyboys is the landlady of 



TATTYBOYS KENTS. 237 

; Tattyboys Eents. There is no dubiety about her existence 
there. Only be a little behindhand with your rent, and you 
will soon be favoured with one of Mr. Barwise's ' Sir, I 
am instructed by Miss Tattyboys ;' and close upon that 
will follow Mr. S. Scrutor, Miss Tattyboys' broker, with 
his distraint, and his levy, and his inventory, and all the 

j sacraments of selling up. I should opine that Miss Tattyboys 
is deaf, for she is remarkable in cases of unpaid rent for not 
listening to appeals for time, and not hearing of a compromise. 
Gilks, the chandler's shopkeeper of number nine, whose wife 

j is always in the family way, and himself in difficulties, once 
' bound himself by a curse ' to seek out Miss Tattyboys at 
Hoxton, to beard her in her very den, and appeal to her 
mercy, her charity, her womanhood, in a matter of two 
quarters owing. He started one. morning, with a determined 
shirt- collar, and fortified by sundry small libations at the 

1 Cape of Good Hope. He returned at nightfall with a haggard 
face, disordered apparel, and an unsteady gait ; was inarticu- 
late and incoherent in his speech ; shortly afterwards went to 
bed ; and to this day cannot be prevailed upon by his ac- 
quaintances, by the wife of his bosom even, to give any 
account of his interview, if interview he had, with the 
Megaera of Hoxton. Mrs. Gilks, a wary woman, who has 
brought, and is bringing, up a prodigious family, has whis- 
pered to Mrs. Spileburg, of the Cape of Good Hope, that, on 
the morning after Gilks's expedition, examining his garments, 
as it is the blessed conjugal custom to do, she found, im- 
printed in chalky dust, on the back of his coat, the mark of a 
human foot ! What could this portend? Did Gilks penetrate 
to Hoxton, and was he indeed kicked by Miss Tattyboys ? or 
did he suffer the insulting infliction at the foot of some 
pampered menial ? Or, coming home despairing, was he led 
to the consumption (and the redundancy of coppers, and the 

1 paucity of silver, in his pockets would favour this view of the 
case) of more liquid sustenance of a fermented nature than 

' was good for him ? And was he in this state kicked by 

, outraged landlord or infuriated pot-companion ? Gilks lives, 

; and makes no sign. Pressed on the subject of Miss Tattyboys, 

! he reluctantly grumbles that she is an ' old image,' and this 

j is all. 

Dear reader (and the digression may be less intolerable, 
seeing that it takes place in what is but a digression itself), 
I do wonder what Miss Tattyboys is like. Is she really the 



238 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

stern, harsh, ■uncompromising female that her acts bespeak 
her? Does she sit in a rigid cap, or still accoutred in the 
black bonnet and veil in a dreary office-like parlour at Hoxton, 
with all her documents docketed on a table before her, or 
glaring from pigeon-holes, shelves, and cupboards? Or is 
she a jolly, apple-faced, little woman, in a cheery room with 
birds and plants and flowers, likiDg a cosy glass and a merry 
song : a Lady Bountiful in the neighbourhood, a Dorcas to 
the poor, the idol of all the dissenting ministers around? 
Perhaps. "Who knows ? Ah ! how unlike we all are to what 
we seem! How the roar of the lion abroad softens into 
the bleat of the lamb at home! How meekly the fierce 
potent schoolmaster of the class-room holds out his knuckles 
for the ruler in the study ! He who is the same in his own 
home of homes as he is abroad, is a marvel, 

Miss Tattyboys has a carriage and a horse, but for certain 
reasons upon which I briefly touched in allusion to the parish 
engine, her visits to the Kents are made perforce on foot. 
Monday mornings, black Mondays emphatically, are her ordi- 
nary visiting days ; and on such mornings you will see her 
duskyform looming at Mr. Fazzle's door, or flitting through the 
Rents as she is escorted to her carriage by Barwise, her agent. 
Communications may be made direct to her, but they always 
come somehow through Barwise. He may be described as 
the buffer to the Tattyboys train ; and run at her ever so 
hard, Barwise receives the first collision, and detracts from 
its force. If Gilks wants time, or Chapford threatens to 
leave unless his roof is looked to, or Mrs. Chownes asks again 
about that kitchen range, or Spileberg expresses a savage 
opinion that his house will tumble in next week, and that 
there'll be murder against somebody, Barwise interposes, 
explains, promises, refuses, will see about it. Which Barwise 
never does. Tou try to get at Miss Tattyboys, but you can't, 
though you are within hand and earshot of her. The por- 
tentous black veil flutters in the wind ; you are dazzled and 
terrified by her huge black reticule bursting with papers ; 
you strive to speak ; but Miss Tattyboys is gone, and all you 
can do is to throw yourself upon Barwise, who throws you 
over. 

The carriage of the landlady of the Eents is an anomalous 
vehicle on very high springs, of which the body seems 
decidedly never to have been made for the wheels, which on 
their part appear to be all of different sizes, and shriek while 



TATTYBOYS EENTS. 239 

moving dreadfully. Mucli basket-work enters into the com- 
position of Miss Tattyboys's carriage, also much rusty leather, 
and a considerable quantity of a fabric resembling bed- 
ticking. There are two lamps, one of which is quite blind 
and glassless, and the other blinking and knocked on one side 
in some by-gone collision, to a very squinting obliquity. 
A complication of straps and rusty iron attaches this equipage 
to a very long-bodied, short-legged black horse, not unlike a 
turnspit dog, which appears to be utterly disgusted with the 
whole turnout, and drags it with an outstretched head and 
outstretched legs, as though he were a dog, and the carriage 
a tin kettle tied to his tail. There have been blood and 
bone once about this horse doubtless ; but the blood is con- 
fined at present to a perpetual raw on his shoulder, artfully 
veiled from the Society's constables by the rags of his dilapi- 
dated collar, and the bone to a lamentably anatomical develop- 
ment of his ribs. To him, is Jehu, a man of grim aspect and 
of brickdust complexion, whose hat and coat are as the hat 
and coat of a groom, but whose legs are as the legs of an 
agricultural labourer, inasmuch as they are clad in corduroy, 
and terminate in heavy shoes, much clayed. He amuses 
himself while waiting for his mistress with aggravating the 
long-bodied horse with his whip on his blind side (he, the horse, 
is wall-eyed) and with reading a tattered volume, averred by 
many to be a book of tracts, but declared by some to be a ' Little 
Warbler,' insomuch as smothered refrains of ' right tooral lol 
looral ' have been heard at times from his dreary coachbox. 
It is not a pleasant sight this rusty carriage with the long 
horse, and the grim coachman jolting and staggering about 
Blitsom Street. It does not do a man good to see the black 
bonnet and veil inside, with the big reticule and the papers, 
and overshadowed by them all, as though a cypress had been 
drawn over her, a poor little weazened diminutive pale-faced 
little girl, in a bonnet preposterously large for her, supposed 
to be Miss Tattyboys's niece, also to be a something in Chan- 
cery, and the ' infant ' about whose ' custody ' there is such a 
fluster every other term, the unhappy heiress of thousands of 
disputed pounds. 

I cannot finally dismiss Miss Tattyboys without saying a 
word about Barwise, her agent. Barwise as a correspondent 
is hated and contemned, but Barwise as a man is popular and 
respected. His letters are dreadful. When Barwise says he 
will e write to you/ you are certain (failing payment) of being 



210 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

sued. Barwise's first letters first begin, ' It is now some time 
since ;' his second missive commences with the awful words, 
' Sir, unless ;' and after that, he is sure to be ' instructed by 
Miss Tattyboys,' and to sell you up. It is horrible, to think 
that Barwise not only collects Miss Tattyboys's rents ; but 
that he collects debts for anybody in the neighbourhood, 
takes out the abhorred ' gridirons,' or County Court sum- 
monses, is an auctioneer, appraiser, valuer, estate, house, and 
general agent. Dreadful thought for Barwise to have a 
general agency over you ! Yet Barwise is not horrible to 
view, being a sandy man of pleasant mien, in a long brown 
coat. He is a capital agent, too, to employ, if you want to 
get in any little moneys that are due to you ; and then it is 
astonishing how you find yourself egging Barwise on, and 
telling him to be firm, and not to hear of delay. I think 
there is but one sentiment that can surpass the indignation a 
man feels at being forced to pay anything he owes — and that 
is the sceva indignatio with which he sets about forcing people 
to pay, who owe him anything. 

Barwise sings a good song, and the parlour of the Cape of 
Good Hope nightly re-echoes to his tuneful muse. I don't 
believe he ever went farther seaward than Greenwich, but he 
specially affects nautical ditties, and his plaintive ' Then 
farewell my trim-built wherry,' and ' When my money was all 
spent,' have been found occasionally exasperating to parties 
whose ' sticks ' he has been instrumental in seizing the day 
before. On festive occasions I have however heard his health 
proposed, and the laudatory notes of ' For he's a jolly good 
fellow !' go round. 

There are three notable institutions in Tattyboys Bents. 
I am rather at a loss which first to touch upon. These are 
the posts, the children, and the dogs — and all three as con- 
nected with the steps. Suppose, in reverse order of rank, I 
take the brute creation first. Tattyboys Eents, if it were 
famous for anything, which it is not, should be famous for 
its dogs. They are remarkable, firstly, for not having any 
particular breed. Gilks, the chandler's shopkeeper, had a 
puppy which was ' giv' to him by a party as was always 
mixed up with dogs,' which he thought, at first, would turn 
out a pointer, then a terrier, then a spaniel ; but was mi- 
serably disappointed in all his conjectures. He had gone to 
the expense of a collar for him, and the conversion of an 
emptied butter-firkin into a kennel, and, in despair, took him 



TATTYBOYS RENTS. 211 

to Chuffers, the greengrocer, and dogs'-meat vendor, in Blit- 
som Street, and solemnly asked his opinion upon him. 
' There hain't a hinch of breed in him,' was the dictum of 
Chuffers, as he contemptuously bestowed a morsel of eleemo- 
sv nary paunch upon the low-bred cur. Charley (this was the 
animal's name) grew up to be a gaunt dog of wolf-like aspect, 
an incorrigible thief, a shameless profligate, a bully, and a 
tyrant. He was the terror of the children and the other 
dogs ; and as if that unhappy Gilks had not already sufficient 
sorrows upon his head, Charley had the inconceivable folly 
and wickedness to make an attack one Monday morning upon 
the sacred black silk dress of Miss Tattyboys. You may imagine 
that Barwise was down upon Gilks the very next day, like a 
portcullis. Charley thenceforth disappeared. Gilks had a 
strange affection for him-, and still cherished a fond belief 
that he would turn out something in the thorough-bred line 
some day ; but the butter-firkin was removed to the back 
yard, and Charley was supposed to pass the rest of his exist- 
ence in howling and fighting with his chain in that town- 
house amid brickbats, cabbage-stalks, and clothes-pegs, having 
in addition a villegiatura or country-house in an adjacent 
dust-bin, into which the length of his chain just allowed him 
to scramble, and in the which he sat among the dust and 
ashes, rasping himself occasionally (for depilatory purposes) 
against a potsherd. 

There is a brown dog of an uncertain shade of mongrelity, 
who (they are all of such decided character, these dogs, that I 
think they deserve a superior pronoun) belongs to nobody in par- 
ticular, and is generally known in the Rents as the Bow-wow. 
As such it is his avocation and delight to seek the company of 
very young children (those of from eighteen months to two 
years of age are his preference) whose favour and familiarity 
he courts, and whom he amuses by his gambols and good- 
humour. The bow-wow is a welcome guest on all door-stej)s, 
and in most entrance-halls. His gymnastics are a never- 
failing source of amusement to the juvenile population, and 
he derives immense gratification from the terms of endearment 
and cajolement addressed by the mothers and nurses to their 
children, all of which expressions this feeble-minded animal 
takes to be addressed to himself, and at which he sniggers 
his head and wags his stump of a tail tremendously. I have 
yet to learn whether this brown, hairy, ugly dog is so fond of 
the little children, and frisks round them, and rolls them over 

R 



242 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

with sucli tender lovingness, and suffers himself to be pulled 
and pinched and poked bj his playmates, all with immovable 
complacency — I say, I have yet to learn whether he does all 
this through sheer good-humour and fondness for children, or 
whether he is a profound hypocrite, skilled in the ways of the 
world, and knowing that the way to Mother Hubbard's cup- 
board, when there are any bones in it, is through Mother 
Hubbard's motherly heart. I hope, for the credit of dog nature 
and for my own satisfaction, loving that nature, that the first 
is the cause. 

The only dog in the Bents that can claim any family or 
breed is an animal hy the name of Buffo, who was, in remote 
times, a French poodle. I say was, for the poodleian ap- 
pearance has long since departed from him, and he resembles 
much more, now, a very dirty, shaggy, white bear, seen 
through the small end of an opera-glass. He was the pro- 
perty, on his first introduction to the Bents, of one Monsieur 
Phillips — whether originally Philippe or not, I do not know — 
who, it was inferred, from sundry strange paraphernalia that 
he left behind him on his abrupt departure from his residence, 
was something in the magician, not to say conjuror and 
mountebank line. Buffo was then a glorious animal, half- 
shaved, as poodles should be, with fluffy rings round his legs, 
and two tufts on his haunches, and a coal-black nose, due per- 
haps to the employment of nitrate of silver as a cosmetic, and a 
pink skin. He could mount and descend a ladder ; he could 
run away when Monsieur Phillips hinted that there was a 
' policeman coming ;' he could limp on one leg ; he could drop 
down dead, dance, climb up a lamp-post at the word of com- 
mand. It was even said that he had been seen in James 
Street, Covent Garden, on a ragged piece of carpet, telling 
fortunes upon the cards, and pointing out Monsieur Phillips 
as the greatest rogue in company. Monsieur Phillips, how- 
ever, one morning suddenly disappeared, leaving sundry 
weeks' rent owing to his landlord, Chapford, of the beer-shop ; 
his only effects being the strange implements of legerdemain 
I have noticed, and the dog Buffo, whom he had placed at 
livery, so to state, at least at a fixed weekly stipend for his 
board and lodging. I need not say that in a very short time 
the unfortunate dog ' ate his head right off ;' the amount of 
paunch he had consumed far exceeding his marketable value. 
Chapford, after vainly debating as to the propriety of turning 
the magician's cups into half-pint measures, and his balls into 



TATTYBOYS RENTS. 243 

bagatelle balls, sold tliem to Scrutor, tlie broker, and Buffo 
himself to Joe (surname unknown), who is a helper up 
Spavins's yard, the livery and bait stables, in Blitsom Street. 
Joe ' knowed of a lady down Kensington wot was werry nuts 
upon poodles ;' and Buffo, prior to his introduction to the 
lady amateur, was subjected to sundry dreadful operations of 
dog-farriery, in the way of clipping, staining, and curtailing, 
which made him from that day forward a dog of sullen and 
morose temper. He soon came back from Kensington in dis- 
grace, the alleged cause of his dismissal being his having 
fought with, killed, and eaten a gray cockatoo. He was re-sold 
to Mrs. Lazenby, old Mr. Fazzle's housekeeper ; but he had 
either forgotten or was too misanthropic to perform any of his 
old tricks, regarded policemen unmoved, and passed by the 
whole pack of cards with profound disdain. A report, too, 
founded on an inadvertent remark of Chapford, that he (Buffo) 
had once been on the stage, and had been fired out of a cannon 
by the clown in a pantomime, succeeded in ruining him in the 
opinion of the Eents, who hold all ; play-actors ' in horror : he 
passed from owner to owner, and was successively kicked out 
and discarded by all, and now hangs about Chapford's, a 
shabby, used-up, degraded, broken-down beast. 

Is there anything more pitiable in animal nature than a 
thoroughly hard-up dog? Such a one I met two Sundays 
back in a shiningly genteel street in Pimlico. He was a cur, 
most wretchedly attenuated, and there in Pimlico he sat, with 
elongated jaws, his head on one side, his eyes wofully up- 
turned, his haunches turned out, his feet together, his tail 
subdued, his ribs rampant : an utterly w r orn-out, denuded, 
ruined old dog. If he had taken a piece of chalk, and written 
6 1 am starving,' fifty times on the pavement in the most 
ornamental caligraphy, it could not have excited more sym- 
pathy than the unutterable expression of his oblique misery, 
propped up sideways as he was against a kitchen railing. I had 
no sooner halted to accost him, than, taking it for granted that 
I was going to kick or beat him because he w^as miserable, 
he shambled meekly into the gutter, where he stood, shiver- 
ing ; but I spoke him fair, and addressing him in what little 
I knew of the Doggee language, strove to reassure him. But 
how could I relieve him ? What could I do for him ? It was 
a stern uncompromising shining British Sunday ; there was 
no back slum nigh ; no lowly shop, whither I could convey 
him to regale on dogs'-meat. Moreover it was church time, 

R 2 



214 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and I could not even purchase licensed victuals for his suc- 
cour. It was no good giving him a penny. I might as well 
have given him a tract. He was unmistakeably mangy, and 
I dared not convey him home ; and I knew of no dag-hospital. 
So I exhorted him to patience and resignation, and left him 
reluctantly ; persuaded that the greatest charity I could have 
extended to him would have been to blow his brains out. 

You are not to think that these I have mentioned are all 
the dogs of which Tattyboys Eents can boast. Many more 
are they, big dogs and little dogs : from that corpulent New- 
foundland dog of Scrutor's, the broker, whose sagacity is so 
astounding as to lead to his being trusted with baskets and 
cash, to purchase bread and butchers' meat — the which he- 
does faithfully, bringing back change with scrupulous exacti- 
tude — and whose only fault is his rapid rate of locomotion, 
and defective vision, which cause him to run up against and 
upset very nearly everybody he meets in his journeys— to 
Bob Blather, the barber's, cock-tail terrier, which can kill a 
■ power of rats,' and has more than once been matched in 
4 Bell's Life ' (familiarly called by the sporting part of the 
Rents, t The Life ') to do so. I may say, to the honour of the 
dogs of Tattyboys Eents, that they seldom stray beyond its; 
limits ; and that if any strange dog descend the steps leading 
thereunto, they invariably fall upon, and strive to demolish 
him with the utmost ferocity. 

The children of the Eents are so much like other street 
children, that they preserve the same traditions of street 
games and songs common to other localties. They are re- 
markable, however, for a certain grave and sedate demeanour, 
which I have never failed to observe in children who are in the 
habit of sitting much upon flights of steps. Such steps are the 
beach of street life, and the sea of the streets rolls on towards 
the stony shore. The steps of Tattyboys Eents are to the 
children there a place of deliberation, recreation, observation, 
and repose. There, is to-morrow's lesson studied ; there, does 
the baby learn a viva-voce lesson in walking ; there, is the dirt- 
pie made, and the sharp-pointed ' cat ' constructed ; there, 
does the nurse-child rest, and the little maid achieve her task 
of sewing ; there, are tops wound, and marbles gambled for, 
and juvenile scandals promulgated; there, is the quarrel 
engendered, and the difference adjusted. It is good to see 
this La Scala of Tattyboys Eents on a sunshiny day ; its 
degrees sown with little people, whose juvenile talk falls 



TATTYBOYS RENTERS. 245 

cheerfully on the ear after the ruder conversation at the posts. 
The posts are immediately behind the steps, forming a grove 
of egress, — a sort of forest of Soignies, behind the Mont Saint 
Jean of the Eents, — into Blitsom Street. At the posts, is 
Chapford's beer-shop ; pots are tossed for at the posts, and 
bets are made on horse-races. Many a married woman in the 
Eents ' drats ' the posts, at whose bases she lays the Saturday 
night vagaries of her 'master;' forgetting how many of her 
own sex are postally guilty, and how often she herself has 
stood a-gossiping at the posts and at the pump. 



XXII. 

TATTYBOYS RENTERS. 



That gregarious tendency common to men, as well as to the 
inferior orders of animation, that leads the devouring lion to 
howl in company with his fellows, minnows to flow together 
into the net of the snarer, herrings to be taken in shoals 
of thousands, blacklegs to horde with blacklegs, lords with 
lords, children with children, birds of a feather, in fact, 
human as well as ornithological, to flock together — has 
brought a considerable number of eccentric parties together in 
Tattyboys Eents. For the Eents being decidedly eccentric of 
themselves as Eents, it was but natural and to be expected 
that at least one party of eccentric character should, in the 
first instance, come to reside in them. After this it was not of 
course surprising, carrying out the birds-of-a-feather theory, 
that other eccentric parties should come and join party number 
one ; and the glorious yet natural result has been, that we 
possess in Tattyboys Eents perhaps as queer a lot of parties 
as you could find (though we are perfectly solvent) out of 
■Queer Street. 

I strove so hard, remis atque velis, in the first instance, to 
give you as sufficient an idea of the Eents, architecturally 
speaking, that I had little space to dilate on the character- 
istics of the inhabitants. You might have been able to 
discern something like eccentricity in Miss Tattyboys, but I 
"Cannot bring her forward with anything like certainty as a 
•character ; she is so unsubstantial, so mythic. As it has 
been often and bitterly complained of by her tenants — you 
don't know where to have her. But the Eents can boast 



246 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

other characters about whom there is no mistake, who stand 
out in hold and well-defined relief, and who, whether trades- 
men or dealing at one another's shops, are emphatically rum 
customers. AY ill you allow me to introduce you to a few? 
Tou will ? Mumchance, stand forth ! 

Eight up at the further end of the Eents, where the 
thoroughfare is blockaded by the high frowning walls of 
Smelt and Pigg's foundry, dwells, in a house — one of the 
dingiest, shabbiest, queerest houses in Tattyboys Eents — 
P. E. Mumchance. Would you know for what stand the 
initials P. E. ? For Peter Eobert, haply?" For Peregrine 
Eeuben, or Pietro Eolando, or Paul Ealph ? Not at all. 
Mumchance's father (commonly known as Old Nutcrackers, 
from the strong development of his facial muscles) was a great 
admirer — some say friend and creditor — of that virtuous, illus- 
trious, and magnanimous prince, the penultimate possessor of 
the British throne; and young Mumchance, being born about 
the year eighteen hundred and eleven, was christened, in a 
moment of loyal enthusiasm, Prince Eegent Mumchance. This 
curious Christian name is a sore point and grievous stumbling- 
block with Mumchance. The Prince Eegent is his old man 
of the sea, his white elephant of Ava. He is fond of political 
discussion. What could an individual bearing so illustrious 
a name be but an out-and-out, an ultra-cerulean Conserva- 
tive ? So Mumchance is a Tory of the bitterest and bluest 
description ; and as the majority of the Eenters are as bitter 
Eadicals, opposing rates, taxes, rents, or indeed any other 
imposts, vehemently, the discussions that nightly take place 
in the parlour of the Cape of Good Hope are not of the 
pleasantest description. Moreover, Mumchance is fond of his 
glass ; and could you expect an individual bearing the august 
name of the great champion of rare beverages (it is whispered, 
even, the inventor of hock and soda-water) to consume such 
vulgar liquids as porter, or gin, or rum ? No. P. E. Mum- 
chance never asks you if you will take a glass of ale, or a 
' drain ' of gin, ' Glass of sherry wine, sir ?' is the Prince 
Regent's hospitable interrogatory ; and a good many glasses 
of sherry wine does the Prince Eegent take in the course of 
the twenty-four hours. 

Mumchance keeps a shop — a stationer's shop. He sells 
stationery, account-books, slates and slate-pencils, tops, 
marbles, string, paste, and, by some curious idiosyncracy, 
pickles. How he got into that line, or how he can reconcile 



TATTYBOYS RENTEES. 247 

pickles with writing-paper, I cannot imagine ; but there are 
the pickles — walnut, onion, and mixed — in big earthen jars ; 
and at all hours of the day you may see small brigades of 
children bearing halfpence and cracked teacups or gallipots, 
bound to Mumchance's for ' a pennorth of pickles, please.' 

But pray don't think that although Mum chance is a 
stationer and account-book manufacturer, his shop is at ail 
like a stationer's. Not at all. It is considerably more like 
the warehouse of a wholesale tobacconist who has sold his 
stock out ; and it has, if I must be candid, a considerable 
dash of the marine-store and of the rag-shop. There is a 
ghcstly remnant of a whilom gigantic pair of scales ; there 
are mysterious tubs and packing-cases, and bulging parcels 
tied with rotten cord. Mumchance does not deny that he 
buys waste-paper ; the evil-minded whisper that he buys and 
sells rags : nay, old Mrs. Brush, the veteran inhabitant al- 
luded to in a former paper, minds the time when a doll — a 
real black doll — swung backward and forward in the wind 
over the door of Toby, commonly hight old Nutcrackers, the 
father of Prince Eegent Mumchance. 

That Mumchance is mad many have declared ; but I, for 
one, do not believe it. That Mnmchance is queer, very queer 
in manners, appearance, and general character, no one can 
deny. Tie is an undersized man, whose portrait can be 
succinctly drawn if I tell you that he is an utter stranger to 
the brush. By the brush I mean the clothes-brush, and the 
hat-brash, the hair-brush, the tooth-brush, the nail-brush, 
and, I may add, the flesh-brush. Buhl-work is a beautiful 
style of ornamentation, so is marqueterie, so is Venetian 
mosaic ; but when you happen to find buhl, marqueterie, and 
mosaic, all represented in a gentleman's face and hands by a 
complicated inlaying and. ingraining of dirt, the spectacle will 
hardly be so pleasant, I fancy, as examples of the same arts in 
a cabinet, an escrutoire, or the cupola of St. Mark's Church. 
So mosaicised is Mumchance. Bets have been freely made 
that he never washes ; but he has been observed to rub his 
face occasionally with a very mouldy pocket-handkerchief of 
no discoverable size or colour, conjectured to be either a 
fragment of an old window-blind, or one of the ancient rags 
purchased by his father Toby in the way of business. Even this 
occasional friction of his countenance, however, is not sup- 
posed to advance in Mumchance the cause of that state which 
is said to be next to godliness ; he wipes his face indeed ; but 



2-18 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lie only removes the impurities of the day, of the hour, to 
show, in all its distinctness, the inlaid dirt of perchance 
years. It is just as when examining an old picture you pass 
a wet cloth over its surface ; and lo ! the mellowness of cen- 
turies becomes visible to you beneath. 

Mumchance's head is, if I may use the expression, rhom- 
boidal. His hair is, as before stated, utterly unbrushed, 
somewhat of the colour of an unbaked brick, and generally in 
a state which I may characterize as fluffy. In fact, minute 
particles of straw, paper, cotton, bread, and other foreign 
substances, may freely be detected on its surface by the naked 
eye alone, which may partially be accounted for, by his 
carrying most of his purchases, sometimes his letters, and 
always his lunch, in his hat. His whiskers, which are of the 
same colour, or the same state of discoloration, as his hair, do 
not appear to have made up their minds yet as to where they 
shall settle, and have grown irregularly about his face, just as 
hirsute things happened to turn up. His complexion I may 
describe heraldically as a field gules, seme (I believe that is the 
word) with sable or dirt. No sign of shirt appears in the entire 
Mumchance. A big black stock confines his neck, and to his 
chin rises his closely-buttoned blue swallow-tailed coat — that 
woeful blue coat with the odd buttons once gilt, and once 
tightly sewn on, but now drooping like Ophelia's willow, 
askant the brook ; the sleeves too short, the tails too long, the 
coat with many darns, and the nap all turned the wrong way. 
Add to this coat (without the connecting isthmus of a waistcoat) 
a pair of corduroy trousers, of which the pockets, apparently 
disgusted with their long seclusion, have burst forth to see 
the world, and stand agape, on Mumchance's hips, at that 
world's wonders ; suppose these trousers to be much frayed at 
the bottom, much inked (he makes calculations on their knees 
frequently), and much too short, and conclude them with 
Wellington boots, patched till they resembled that knight's 
silk stockings that were darned so frequently that they 
changed their texture from silk to worsted — and you have 
Mumchance before you, all but his shamble, his watery eye, 
his rich though somewhat husky voice. 

For all his shabby appearance, however, once a .year Mum- 
chance throws aside his chiysalis garb, and comes forth a full- 
blown butterfly. Once a year he dines with his Company — ■ 
the Stationers — at the grand old hall in the dim regions of the 
city ; for Mumchance is a citizen, a liveryman, a worshipful 



TATTYBOYS RENTERS. 249 

stationer — who but lie — and so was Toby his father before him. 
He goes to the dinner of his Company, clean, rosy, shaven, 
with a shirt, aye, and a shirt frill, a blue coat and gilt buttons, 
but new, glossy, well brushed, a shiny hat, and shiny boots. 
Thus he goes ; but how he comes back no inhabitant of Tatty- 
boys Rents has ever been able to discover. The policeman 
should know ; but he affects ignorance ; and though I do not 
wish to impute corruption to that functionary, it is certain that 
Mumchance is always leaving private drains of liquor for him 
at the bar of the Cape of Good Hope, for at least a week follow- 
ing his Company's dinner. 

Some of the renters have affirmed that they have heard with 
the chimes at midnight dismal ditties trolled forth in inco- 
herent accents ; and these are surmised to have issued from 
Mumchance while in a state of conviviality, and to have been 
occult Stationers' songs, taught him along with the other arts 
and mysteries of the worshipful craft in his earliest youth. 
Mrs. Mumchance (an elongated female of an uncertain age, 
with a vexed cap and a perturbed gown) is a lady with a fixed 
idea. That idea is Fisher. Fisher, whether he be the family 
doctor, lawyer, nearest kinsman, dearest friend, or most valued 
adviser, is at all events Mrs. Mum chance's Law and Prophet. 
Fisher recommends her change of air. Fisher has inexorably 
prophesied her dissolution within six calendar months, if she 
continues worreting herself about her family. Fisher warned 
her against the second floor lodger, who ran away without 
paying his rent. Fisher advises her to stand it no longer with 
Mr. Muinchance's recalcitrant debtors, but to employ Barwise, 
and summons them all forthwith. TVhen Fisher said Mrs. Mum- 
chance, said he, beware of Mrs. Tuckstrap, were not those the 
words of truth? On all emergencies, in all difficulties and 
dilemmas, Mrs. Mumchance throws herself upon Fisher, He 
is intimately mixed up with the whole family. Mumchance 
professes the highest respect and veneration for him. Mr. Fisher 
he says, a man of the first, of the very first. Coat buttoned 
up to here, sir. Great friend of poor father's, sir. Frequently 
does he escape curtain lectures on late and vinous returns to 
his Lares and Penates on the plea that he has been ' along with 
Fisher.' If you ask Charley, Mumchance's youngest, who his 
godfather was, he will answer, ' Missa Fisser;' if you ask him 
who or what Missa Fisser, or Fisher may be, he will answer, 
a ' chown ;' from which, however, it is not to be inferred abso- 
lutely that Fisher is connected with the stage in a red ochre 



250 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and bismuth view as a clown ; Charley's ideas of trades and 
professions being necessarily vague as yet; arid his whole 
bump of admiration having been so engrossed by a pantomimic 
performance of which he was lately the spectator, that he 
applies the epithet ehown, or clown, to everything great, or 
good, or pleasant ; being even known to address as chown, 
horses, sweetstufT, hoopsticks, fenders, and halfpence. 

I never had the pleasure of seeing Fisher ; but Mrs. Brush, 
the oldest inhabitant, has seen him, and describes him as a 
pleasant-spoken body. Mrs. Spileburg, of the Cape of Good 
Hope, declares him to be a born gentleman, as takes his drink 
quite hearty like, which it would do you good to see. I should 
like to know Fisher. 

Mumchance has an indefinite number of children. I say 
indefinite, for they are always being born and going out to 
service, and walking out with Tom or Dick So and So, and 
marrying, and so on. There is always, however, an eldest 
daughter Annie, tall, lanky, and fourteen, who must begin to 
do something for herself shortly, and a youngest boy, at present 
Charley ; but the whole family have such a curious way of 
shooting up and growing into maturity suddenly, that I should 
not be at all surprised on my next visit to the Eents to learn 
that Annie was suckling her second, or that Charley had. en- 
listed in the Life Guards. 

Mumchance's trade and manner of doing business, puzzle 
and amaze me sorely. Men repute him to be wealthy : I 
know he spends a great deal of money, yet I seldom see him 
sell anything more considerable than a ha'porth of slate pencil, 
a sheet of writing-paper, a penn'orth of wafers, or a penny 
bottle of ink. The man who could purchase a quire of fools- 
cap, or half gross of steel pens, was never yet known, I opine, 
to enter Mumchance's. He tries to force the market^ some* 
times, and to create a factitious excitement about his wares, by 
displaying in front of his establishment placards in pen and 
ink, containing such announcements as ' Cheapest wafers in the 
world !' c Paper down again f ' Great news !' ' Ink a penny a 
bottle ;' but the passers-by regard these notifications irreve- 
rently, and point to the inferior quality of the paper and ink 
of the placard, in depreciation of the stationery within : nay, 
even raise objections against Mumchance's pens, because 
Mumchance's writing is none of the best, and his orthography 
none of the most correct. 

Mumchance puts the coldness of the public all down to the 



TATTYBOYS RENTEES. 251 

fault of the times. "What's the good of painting the shop, sir ? 
he asks. Poor father never did, sir, and Ave had nobility here. 
Nobility, sir. But look at the times. Would nobility come 

here now, sir ? 

I generally admit, when JIumchance asks me this question, 
that nobility would not. 

■ That's it, sir,' says Jlumchance triumphant (he always 
says sir, even to the massed little bovs who come in for a 
penn'orth of pickles). ' That's it. it's the times. Nobody buys 
stamps now a days. In poor father's time, we sold millions of 
stamps, sir. Lord Cabus, sir. Proud man, sir. Coat buttoned 
up to here, sir. Sit on the counter, sir. All in black, sir, 
with his coat buttoned. Jlumchance, he'd say to poor father, 
JIumchance, bless your eyes, fifty pounds' worth of bill stamps. 
Proud man, sir, Lord Cabus: never would take hold of xhe 
handle of the door with his hand : always took the tail of his 
coat to it, like this, sir,' and JIumchance suits the action to the 
word. 

I may remark as one of the most eccentric among Mmn- 
chance's idiosyncracies that the very great majority of his titled 
or celebrated acquaintances are always dressed in black, and 
have their coats buttoned up to here, meaning the chin. Thus, 
when Jlumchance went to see Edmund Kean, and there was, 
in consequence of a certain trial, a violent commotion in the 
house against the tragedian, JIumchance described Kean as 
coming forward to address the audience attired in black, with 
his coat buttoned up to here. Similarly attired, according to 
Jlumchance, was wont to be the famous Jack Thurtell. who 
was a great customer of poor father's, for bill stamps. Likewise 
all in black, with coats buttoned up to here, were a mysterious 
company of four-and-twenty forgers who, according to Jlum- 
chance, were discovered sitting round a Ions table with a green 
baize cover (forging with all their might and main, I presume), 
vy Townshend the officer (vide Little Blitsom Street gang), 
I. can imagine Townshend with his coat buttoned up : but 
with the traditions of his white hat, red waistcoat, and top 
boots, still in my mind, I cannot form to myself an idea of him 
— all in black. 

The number of extraordinary characters with whom Jlum- 
chance has been acquainted and connected, and whose little 
peculiarities he descants upon, is astonishing. His anecdotes 
bearing upon Colonel Bubb alone, would fill a volume. The 
Colonel is to Jlunichance what Fisher is to JXrs. M. On all 



252 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

political, parochial, financial, and social questions, lie is his 
ohief adviser, and his heroic advice is ordinarily, ' Mumchance, 
be firm.' I met Mumchance once, just before the opening 
of a session of Parliament by her gracious Majesty. There 
had been some silly mares-nests found about that time by 
some sillier politicians, and grim whispers circulated about 
an illustrious personage, treason, the Tower, tampering with 
treaties, and such twopenny trash. Mumchance was full 
of it. He had scarcely time to gasp out his customary 
invite of ' glass of sherry wine, sir, and a crust?' and to dive 
into a previously invisible public-house (he knows all the slip- 
in and slip-out public-houses in London), before he had me 
fast with Colonel Bubb on the illustrious question. Saw him 
this morning, sir. Got his leathers on, sir (I conjecture the 
Colonel to be in the cavalry). Got his cloak over his leathers, 
sir (a cloak this time, but well buttoned up you may be sure 
of it). Mumchance, he says, I've got my army in the park. 
Drawn up (in their leathers, I suppose). Mumchance, blood 
before night. Blood ! With which horrifying conclusion, 
Colonel Bubb departed in his leathers, as Mumchance took 
care supplementarily to inform me, to rejoin his army. I did 
go down to the park that day, where I saw the usual number of 
big lifeguardsmen ; but I missed Colonel Bubb, his cloak, and 
his leathers, and I saw no blood, either that night or the next. 
I cannot part with Mumchance without telling you that in 
his crazy, dingy, unpainted house in Tattyboys Bents he has 
■something else besides slate-pencils, pickles, and penny bottles 
of ink: Up stairs, amid much dirt, and dust, and flew, he has 
some nobly carved oaken bedsteads and rare old cabinets filled 
with real porcelain, yet rarer, and yet older. Also down in 
his cellar Mumchance has stores of considerable value. Here, 
among the dirt and dust, and above a sort of subsoil of the 
rags in which Mumchance was libellously supposed to deal, lie 
hundreds of books, many of them bygone and worthless 
pamphlets and tracts, but many rare and beautiful copies of 
expensive works. How he came by these Mumchance vouch- 
safes not to tell ; neither will he explain how he became pos- 
sessed of the copper-plates engraved in line and mezzotinto 
and aquatint, which lumber the floor, and on whose dusky 
surfaces I can observe dim shadowings of landscapes after 
Yfilson, and beauties after Sir Joshua Beynolds. Poor father 
would appear to have had something to do with the original 
acquisition of these rarities, and the hardness of the times to 



TATTTBOYS RENTERS. 253 

prevent their conversion into money ; so here they, and proofs 
from the plates themselves, and the hooks, and papers, and 
rags, all mildew and rot in Muinchance's cellar. 

Bunnnaging among the heap one day I found a huge oak- 
bound, iron-clasped volume, written in black and red letter on 
vellum, in Saxon and Latin. It was the Eent Eoll of Glaston- 
bury Abbey ! I confess that I immediately broke the tenth com- 
mandment, and began to covet my neighbour's goods ; in fact, 
I offered Mumchance several small sums, increasing in amount 
at every bid, for the volume. He seemed at first disposed to 
acquiesce, but requested time in order that he might consult 
Fisher. The upshot of it was that Fisher, (seconded no doubt- 
by Colonel Bubo) strongly advised him not to sell the book 
until the arrival of a lady — name unknown — then sojourning 
at Jerusalem, who knew all languages, and could read the 
volume, as easy as a glove. As I never saw the oak-bound 
volume again, and as I heard that Mumchance had sold it to 
the trustees of a public library for forty guineas, I concluded 
either that the lady possessing the lingual accomplishments 
had come back from Jerusalem rather sooner than was expected, 
or that Mumchance was not so mad as his neighbours took him 
to be. 

Thus have I drawn the portrait of Prince Eegent Mum- 
chance. en pied, yet still grossly, broadly, sketchily. Were I 
to stay to define, to detail, to stipple the little points of his 
character, as Mr. Holman Hunt does his faces, I should weary 
myself and you : nay, more than that, I should leave no space 
for a three-quarter portrait of another eccentric party in the 
Rents, old Signor Fripanelli. 

What Gian Battisto Girolamo Fripanelli of Bologna, pro- 
fessor of singing and the pianoforte, could have been about 
when he came to lodge at Miss Drybohn's, number eighteen 
in the Bents, I am sure I don't know, yet with Miss Drybohn 
he has lodged for very nearly twenty years. They say that 
he came over to England at the Peace of Amiens, that he was 
chapel-master to Louis the Sixteenth, and that he only escaped 
the guillotine during the reign of terror, by composing a 
Sonata for the fete of the Goddess of Liberty. At any rate he 
is of a prodigious age, although his stature is but diminutive. 
I regret to state that the boys call him Jacko, and shout that 
derisive appellation after him in the street. These unthink- 
ing young persons affect to trace a resemblance between the 
venerable Signor Fripanelli, and the degraded animal which 



25-1 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

eats nuts and grins between the bars of a cage in the Zoolo- 
gical Gardens. To be sure, the Signor is diminutive in 
stature. His head is narrow and long, his ears are large, his 
eyes small, his cheekbones high, his complexion sallow and 
puckered into a thousand wrinkles ; to be sure his hands are 
singularly long and bony, and he walks with a sort of stum- 
bling hop, and is generally munching something between his 
sharp teeth, and has a shrill squeaking voice, and gesticulates 
violently when excited ; but is a gentleman to be called 
Jacko — to be likened to a low monkey for these peculiarities ? 
Signor Fripanelli wears, summer and winter, a short green 
cloak, adorned with a collar of the woolly texture, generally 
denominated poodle ; a white hat stuck at the very back of 
his head, threadbare black pantoloons, and very roomy shoes 
with rusty strings. This costume he never varies. In it he 
goes out giving lessons ; in it, less the hat, he sits at home at 
Miss Drybohn's ; in it he goes twice every Sunday, in his own 
simple, quiet, honest fashion to the Eoman Catholic Chapel in 
Lateran Street, out of Turk's Lane. 

It would seem to favour the insolent Jacko theory concern- 
ing the poor Signor that Miss Drybohn, who it is generally 
acknowledged has the worst tongue in her head of any 
spinster in the Eents, and who, though Fripanelli has lodged 
with her for twenty years, and has never been a fortnight 
behind-hand with his rent — that Miss Drybohn, I say, declares 
that when the Signor returns home at night and retires to his 
bed-room, which is immediately above hers, she always hears 
(though she knows that he is alone) the noise of four feet 
pattering above. She accuses nobody, she states nothing, but 
such (she says) it is — and the by-standers shake their heads and 
whisper that the Signor, on return home, fatigued with teach- 
ing, assumes his natural position — in other words, that he 
crawls about on all-fours, like a baboon on the branch of a 
tree. Horror ! 

Seriously, although the little man is like a monkey, he is 
one of the bravest, worthiest, kindest creatures alive. He has 
very little money ; none but those who know what the life of 
an obscure foreign music-master is can tell how difficult it is 
for him to live, much less to save, in England ; but from his 
scanty means he gives freely to his poor fellow-countrymen, 
yea, and to aliens of other climes and other creeds. Fifteen 
years ago, the Signor had a fine connection among the proud- 
est aristocracy of this proud land. Yes, he taught singing at 



THE MUSICAL WOBLD. 255 

half a guinea a lesson, in Grosvenor Square, and Park Lane 
and Mayfair. You may see some of his old songs now 
yellow-tattered and fly-blown on the music book-stalls : 
Cabaletto, dedicated by permission to the most noble the 
Marchioness of Antidiloof, by her obliged, faithful, and 
humble servant, Gian Battisto Girolamo Fripanelli. Aria, 
inscribed with the most devoted sentiments of respect and 
reverence to Her Grace the Duchess of Forth erfludd, by Her 
Grace's etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There have been scores 
of the fairest and noblest young English ladies, whose taper 
ringers have been taught by poor old Jacko to fall harmoni- 
ously upon the ivory keys, whose ruby lips and pearly teeth 
he has tutored with much stress of sol-faing, to give due and 
proper, and gentle, and impassioned utterance to the silver 
strains of Italian song. Gian Battisto has been asked to 
lunch by Dukes — aye, and to dinner too, and has sat next 
to Ambassadors and Plenipotentiaries — parties to the Holy 
Alliance and hung with stars and crosses,, as that patient 
gentleman near the Bank of England (who also sells pocket- 
books) is with dog-collars. He has played the grandest of 
grand sonatas and symphonies on the grandest of pianofortes, 
at fashionable soirees ; the fairest of the fair have brought him 
ices and macaroons; Lords, Baronets, and Chief Justices 
have called him Fripanelli, and given him to snuff out of their 
gold and jewelled boxes ; and the list of his pupils, with their 
half-guinea lessons, has been at times so swollen, that, work 
from morning till night, however hard he might, some were 
sure to be in arrear. 

But, ah me ! what changes take place in fifteen months — 
what Worlds are upheaved, demolished, and built up again in 
fifteen years ; Fripanelli did not change ! he had always 
been, or seemed to be, as old and as ugly as he was before ; 
but fashion changed — time changed. The fifteen years in 
their remorseless whirl have caught him up scornfully from 
Grosvenor Square and the half-guinea lessons and have dropped 
him in Tattyboys Rents, to give lessons in singing, in instru- 
mental music, in French, and even Italian, should the latter be 
required, in tenth-class schools, to the daughters of small 
tradesmen about the Rents and Blitsom Street, and Turk's 
Lane, for a shilling a lesson, for sixpence a lesson, for seven 
shillings a quarter, for anything that poor Gian Battisto can 
get to buy a crust with. 

Such is life for Art in the world's Rents, as well as Tatty- 



256 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

boys'. The educated and titled mob, which is ten times more 
fickle, false, and capricious than the grossest Flemish rabble 
that ever idolized an Artevelde, or massacred a De Witt, will 
quietly drop you, when it has had enough of you, and will 
let you starve or die, or go hang, with admirable indifference 
and composure. And it serves you, and all other lions, 
thoroughly right, who have not had the modest manhood to 
be quietly superior to such mob, and to let it go its way. I 
do not say this of poor old Fripanelli, for he was a stranger 
in the land before he came to the Eents, and he may easily 
have taken its surface for its core. 



XXIII. 

DOW^" WHITECHAPEL WAY. 



4 Sir,' said Samuel Johnson to the Scotch gentleman— 4 sir, let 
us take a walk down Fleet Street.' If I had not a thousand 
other reasons to love and revere the memory of the great and 
good old Doctor, I should still love and revere it for his pre- 
ference of Fleet Street to the fields— of streets generally to 
sylvan shades — of the hum of men and the rattling of wheels, 
to the chirp of the cricket or the song of the skylark. It may 
be prejudice, or an unpoetic mind, or so on : but I am, as I 
have observed five hundred times before ; and my critics may 
well ask, ' why observe it again ?' of the streets, streety. I 
love to take long walks, not only down Fleet Street, but up 
and down all other streets, alleys, and lanes. I love to loiter 
about Whitehall, and speculate as to which window of the 
Banqueting House it was, and whether at the front, or at the 
back,* that Charles Stuart came out to his death. I see a vivid 
mind-picture of the huge crowd gathered together that bleak 
January morning, to witness the fall of that ' grey discrowned 
head.' Drury Lane I affect especially, past and present — the 
Maypole, Nelly Gwynne, and the Earls of Craven, dividing 
my interest with Vinegar Yard, the costermongers, the pawn- 
brokers, and the stage door of the theatre round the corn en 



*& v 



* At the back for five hundred] pounds, despite Mr. Peter Cunningham, 
who maintains that it was at the front towards the park. I have law and 
prophecy, book and broadside, mint and cumin to prove it, and I will— 
tome day. 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY. So L 

Holborn. Cheapside, the Old Bailey, the great thoroughfares on 
the Surrey side of the water, have all equal charms for me. 

I will take a walk ' down Whitechapel way.' 

How many thousands of us have lived for years — for a third 
part of our lives, probably, in London — and have never been 
down the YYhitechapel Eoad ? I declare that there are not 
half a dozen persons in the circle of my acquaintance who can 
tell me where Bethnal Green is. As to Eatcliffe Highway. 
Shadwell, Poplar, Limehouse, and Eotherhithe, they are en- 
tirely terrce incognitce to shoals of born-and-bred Londoners. 

' Down Whitechapel way.' Have you ever been ' down ' 
that way. reader ? Ten to one you have not. You have heard, 
probably, of Whitechapel needles ; and the costermonger from 
whom you may occasionally have condescended to purchase 
vegetables would very likely inform you, were you to ask 
him, that he lives ' down that way.' Perhaps your impres- 
sions connected with Whitechapel refer vaguely to butchers. 
or, probably, to Jews, or possibly to thieves. Very likely 
you don't trouble yourself at all about the matter. You had 
an aunt once who lived at Mile End : but she quarrelled with 
everybody during her lifetime, and left her money to the 
London Hospital when she died, and you never went to see 
her. You see scores of omnibuses pass your door daily, with 
Aldgate, Whitechapel, Mile End, painted on their panels ; but 
you have no business to transact there, and let the omnibuses 
go on their way without further comment. 

Those who care to know a little about what their nei^h- 
bours in the Far East are doing this Saturday night, are very 
welcome to accompany me in the little excursion I am about 
to make. A thick pair of boots, and perhaps a mackintosh, or 
some light covering of that sort, would not be out of place : 
for it is as rainy, slushy, and muddy a Saturday night as you 
would desire to have (or not to have) in the month of October. 
Stay, here is a friend with us who has known Whitechapel and 
its purlieus any time this five-and-twenty years, on all sorts of 
days and nights. Here is another who is an enthusiast in the 
noble art of self-defence, and who insists on forming one of 
our party, on the principle that a night excursion to White- 
chapel must necessarily involve a ; scrimmage,' and an op- 
portunity to develop the celebrated tactics of the prize-ring on 
a grand scale. Those who patronize the deleterious weed may 
light cigars ; and so onward towards Y\ hit e chap elj 

On, through Fleet Street — passing St. Dunstan's as eight 

s 



258 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

strikes ; noting the newspaper offices blazing with gas from 
basement to garret ; jostled occasionally by the well-looking 
(though ruined) agricultural gentlemen, with massy watch- 
chains (and bankrupt purses) , who have been discussing port 
and Protection* after an ample dinner at Peele's or Anderton's. 
On, and up Ludgate the lofty, watching the red and blue 
lights of the doctors' shops as they are mirrored in the wet 
pavement; and thinking, perhaps, that, after all, there may 
be some good in that early closing movement which has fast- 
ened the portals of all those magnificent palaces of linen- 
drapery, and sent those shoals of spruce clerks and assistants 
forth for health and recreation — many, it is to be hoped, to 
the Literary and Scientific Institute, the class-room, and the 
singing lesson, and not all (as some kind souls would insinu- 
ate) to the tap-room or the cigar-shop. On, round the solemn 
dome of St. Paul's, and by that remarkable thoroughfare on 
the left hand side, where, to my mind, the odours of a pastry- 
cook's shop, of a tallow-manufactory, of the defunct, yet 
promising to be phoenix-like Chapter Coffee House, and all the 
newly-bound books in Paternoster Eow are irrevocably com- 
bined and blended. On, by Cheapside, the magnificent, where 
rows of dazzling gas-reflectors illumine shop-fronts, teeming 
with yet more dazzling stores of watches, rich jeweller} 7 , and 
bales of silver spoons and forks. There are desolate ragged 
wretches staring wistfully at the glittering heaps of baubles, the 
clocks, the tiny, ladies' watches rich in enamel and jewels, the 
repeaters, the chronometers, the levers jewelled in ever so 
many holes, the trinkets, and chatelains, and ' charms,' and 
Albert guard-chains, which Mr. John Bennett, a doughty 
watchmaker he exposes to public admiration, just as they 
would at the pennyworth of pudding in the window of a 
cook's shop. Are they speculating on the possibility of a gold 
watch filling a hungry belly ? or are they, haply, contempla- 
ting one bold dash through the frail sheet of glass — one hasty 
snatch at the watches, and rings, and bracelets — one desperate 
throw for luxury and riot at the best ; or at the worst, for the 
comfortable gaol, the warm convict's dress, and the snug cell 
with its hot- water pipes ? 

Leaving Cheapside, the magnificent; avoiding the omnibuses 
in the Poultry as best we may ; skirting the huge Mansion 

* Written er.e 'Protection,' as an idea, died a natural death, and became 
a 'shadow of the shadow of Smoke.' 



DOWX WHITECHAPEL WAY. 259 

House, where a feeble gleam from an office in the basement 
suggests that Messrs. John and Daniel Forrester are yet wide 
awake, while the broad glare of light from the windows in 
Charlotte Row proclaims jolly civic festivities in the Egyptian 
Hall ; striking through Cornhill, the wealthy ; crossing Grace- 
church Street, and suppressing a lingering inclination to take 
a stroll by the old Flower Pot, and older South Sea House, 
into old Bishopsgate Street, just to have a vagabond quarter 
of an hour or so of thought about Baring Brothers, Crosby 
Hall, Great St. Helen's, Sir Thomas More, and Mr. Boss the 
hairdresser : — Supposing this, I say, our party boldly invades 
Leadenhall Street. Opposite the India House I must stop for a 
moment, however. Is there not Billiter Street hard-by, with 
that never-dying smell of Cashmere shawls and opium chests 
about the • sale-rooms ? Is there not St. Mary Axe, redolent 
of Hebrew London ? Is there not the great house itself, with 
all its mighty associations of Clive and Warren Hastings, 
Xuncomar, and Lally Tollendal, PI assy, Arcot, and Seringa- 
patam — Sheridan, thundering in Westminster Hall on the case 
of the Begums — and the mighty directors, with their millions 
of subjects, and their palaces in Belgravia and Tyburnia, who 
were once but poor hucksters and chapmen of Trichonopoly 
chains and indigo balls — mere buyers and sellers of rice, sugar, 
and pepper ? But my companions are impatient, and, dropping 
a hasty tear to the memory of Mr. Toole, the great toastm aster 
and beadle — (dost thou remember him, Eugenio, in that mag- 
nificent cocked hat and scarlet coat ? and Eugenio replies 
that he lives again in his son) — we leave Leadenhall Street 
the broad for Leadenhall Street the narrow ; and where the 
tortuous Fenchurch Street also converges, emerge into the 
open space by Aid gate pump. We have no time to dilate 
on the antiquity of the pump. A hundred yards to the left, 
and here we are, not absolutely in Whitechapel itself, but at 
the entrance of that peculiar and characteristic district, which 
I take to be bounded by Mile-end gate on the east, and by the 
establishment of Messrs. Moses and Son on the west. 

First, Moses. Gas, splendour, wealth, boundless and im- 
measurable, at a glance. Countless stories of gorgeous show- 
rooms, laden to repletion with rich garments. Gas everywhere. 
Seven hundred burners, they whisper to me. The tailoring 
department ; the haberdashery department ; the hat, boots, 
shawl, outfitting, cutlery department. Hundreds of depart- 
ments. Legions of ' our young men ' in irreproachable coats, 

s 2 



2 GO GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT, 

and neckcloths void of reproach. Corinthian columns, enriched 
cornices, sculptured panels, arabesque ceilings, massive chande- 
liers, soft carpets of choice patterns, luxury, elegance, the 
riches of a world, the merchandise of two, everything that 
anybody ever could want, from a tin shaving-pot to a Cashmere 
shawl. Astonishing cheapness — wonderful celerity — enchant- 
ing civility ! Great is Moses of the Minories ! Of the Mino- 
ries ? of everywhere. He pervades Aldgate ; he looms on 
Whitechapel ; an aerial suspension bridge seems to connect 
his Minorial palace with his VYest End Branch. Moses is 
everywhere. When I came from Weedon the other day, his 
retainers pelted me with his pamphlets as I quitted the railway 
station. Moses has wrenched the lyre and the bays from our 
laureate's hands ; he and his son are the monarchs of Parnassus. 
His circulars are thrown from balloons and fired out of cannon. 
I believe they must grow in market gardens somewhere out of 
town — they are so numerous. Of course, Moses is a great 
public benefactor. 

Crossing the Minories, and keeping on the right-hand side 
of the road, we are in the very thick of ' Butcher Eow ' at 
once. A city of meat ! The gas, no longer gleaming through 
ground-glass globes, or aided by polished reflectors, but flaring 
from primitive tubes, lights up a long vista of beef, mutton, 
and veal. Legs, shoulders, loins, ribs, hearts, livers, kidneys, 
gleam in all the gaudy panoply of scarlet and white on every 
side. ' Buy, buy, buy ! ; resounds shrilly through the greasy, 
tobacco-laden, gas-rarefied air. There are eloquent butchers, 
who rival Orator Henley in their encomia on the legs and 
briskets they expose ; insinuating butchers, who wheedle the 
softer sex into purchasing, with sly jokes and well-turned 
compliments ; dignified butchers (mostly plethoric, double- 
chinned men, in top-boots, and doubtless wealthy), who seem 
to think that the mere appearance of their meat, and of them- 
selves, is sufficient to insure custom, and seldom condescend 
to mutter more than an occasional 'Buy!' Then, there are 
bold butchers — vehement rogues, in stained frocks — who utter 
frantic shouts of ' Buy, buy, buy !' ever and anon making a 
ferocious sally into the street, and seizing some unlucky 
wight, who buys a leg of mutton or a bullock's heart, nolens 
volens ! 

Bless the women ! how they love marketing ! Here they 
are by scores. Pretty faces, ugly faces, young and old, chaf- 
fering, simpering, and scolding vehemently. Now, it is the 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY. 261 

portly matron — housekeeper, may be, to some wealthy, retired 
old bachelor ; she awes the boldest butcher, and makes even 
the dignified one incline in his top-boots. And here is the 
newly-married artisan's wife — a fresh, rosy-cheeked girl, 
delightfully ignorant of housekeeping, though delighted with 
its responsibilities — charmingly diffident as to what she shall 
buy, and placing implicit, and it is to be hoped, not misplaced, 
confidence in the insinuating butcher, who could, I verily 
believe, persuade her that a pig's fry is a saddle of mutton. 
Poor thing ! she is anxious to be at home and get Tom's 
supper ready for him ; and as for Tom, the sooner he gets 
away from the public-house, where his wages are paid him 
every Saturday night, the better it will be for his wife and 
for him, too, I opine. There are but few male purchasers of 
butchers' meat. Stay, here is one — a little, rosy man, in 
deep black, and with a very big basket, and holding by the 
hand a little rosy girl, in black as deep as his. He is a widower, 
I dare say, and the little girl his daughter. How will it be, 
I wonder, with that couple, a dozen years hence? Will the 
little girl grow big enough to go to market by herself, while 
father smokes his pipe at home ? or, will father marry again, 
and a shrewish stepmother ill-treat the girl, till she runs away 

and Well well ! we have other matters besides Butcher 

Bow to attend to. We can but spare a glance at that gaunt 
old man, with the bristly beard and the red eyelids, who is 
nervously fingering, while he endeavours to beat down the 
price of those sorry scraps of meat yonder. His history is 
plain enough to read, and is printed in three letters on his 
face. G. I. N. 

On the pavement of this Butcher Bow, we have another 
market, and a grand one too. Not confined, however, to the 
sale of any one particular article, but diversified in an eminent 
degree. Half-way over the kerbstone and the gutter, is an 
apparently interminable line of ' standings ' and ' pitches/ 
consisting of trucks, barrows, baskets, and boards on tressels, 
laden with almost every imaginable kind of small merchan- 
dise. Oysters, vegetables, fruit, combs, prints in inverted 
umbrellas, ballads, cakes, sweetstuff, fried fish, artificial 
flowers (!), chairs, brushes and brooms, soap, candles, crockery- 
ware, ironmongery, cheese, walking-sticks, looking-glasses, 
frying-pans, bibles, waste-paper, toys, nuts, and fire-wood. 
These form but a tithe of the contents of this Whitechapel 
Bezesteen. Each stall is illuminated, and each in its own 



262 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

peculiar manner. Some of the vendors are careless, and their 
lamps are but primitive, consisting of a rushlight stuck in a 
lump of clay, or a turnip cut in half. But there is a degree 
of luxury in not a few ; ' Holliday's lamps,' green paper shades, 
' fishtail ' burners, and, occasionally, camphine lamps, being 
freely exhibited. I don't think you could collect together, in 
any given place in Europe, a much queerer assortment than 
the sellers of the articles exposed, were it not the buyers 
thereof. Here are brawny costermongers by dozens, in the 
orthodox corduroys, fur caps, and 4 king's man ' handkerchiefs. 
Lungs of leather have they, marvellous eloquence, also, in 
praising carrots, turnips, and red herrings. Here, too, are 
street mechanics, manufacturers of the articles they sell, and 
striving with might and main to sell them ; and you will find 
very few, or rather, no Irish among this class. I see women 
among the street sellers, as I move along — some, poor widow 
souls — some, who have grown old in street trading — some, 
little puny tottering things, sobbing and shivering as they 
sell. The buyers are of all descriptions, from the middle to 
the very lowest class, inclusive. Buddy mechanics, with 
their wives on their arms, and some sallow and shabby, reel- 
ing to and from the gin-shops. Decent married women, and 
comely servant girls, with latch-keys and market-baskets. 
Beggars, by dozens. Slatternly, frowsy, drabs of women, 
wrangling with wrinkled crones, and bating down the price 
of a bunch of carrots fiercely. Blackguard boys, with painted 
faces, tumbling head over heels in the mud. Bulky costers, 
whose day's work is over, or who do not care to work at all. 
Grimy dustmen, newly emancipated from the laystall. The 
bare-headed, or battered- bonneted members of the class called 
(and truly) unfortunate, haunt the other side of the road. 
There is too much light and noise here for them. 

But the noise ! the yelling, screeching, howling, swearing, 
laughing, fighting saturnalia ; the combination of commerce, 
fun, frolic, cheating, almsgiving, thieving, and devilry; the 
Geneva-laden tobacco-charged atmosphere ! The thieves, now 
pursuing their vocation, by boldly snatching joints of meat 
from the hooks, or articles from the stalls ; now, peacefully, 
basket in hand, making their Saturday night's marketing (for 
even thieves must eat). The short pipes, the thick sticks, the 
mildewed umbrellas, the dirty faces, the ragged coats ! Let 
us turn into the gin-shop here, for a moment. 
■ It is a remarkably lofty, though not very spacious, edifice — 



DOWN WHITECKAPEL WAY. 263 

the area, both before and behind the bar, being somewhat 
narrow. There are enormous tubs of gin, marked with an 
almost fabulous number of gallons each ; and there are compo- 
site columns, and mirrors, and handsome clocks, and ormolu 
candelabra, in the approved Seven Dials style. But the com- 
pany are different. They have not the steady, methodical, 
dram-drinking system of the Seven Dials, Drury Lane, and 
Holborn gin-shop halitues ; the tremulous deposition of the 
required three halfpence : the slow, measured, draining of the 
glass ; the smack of the lips, and quick passing of the hand 
over the mouth, followed by the speedy exit of the regular 
dram-drinker, who takes his ' drain ' and is off, even if he be 
in again in a short time. These vVhitechapel gin-drinkers 
brawl and screech horribly. Blows are freely exchanged, and 
sometimes pewter measures fly through the air like Shrapnell 
shells. The stuff itself, which in the western gin-shops goes 
generally by the name of ' blue ruin ' or ' short, 5 is here called 
indifferently, ' tape,' ' max,' ' duke,' ' garter,' and ' jacky.' 
Two more peculiarities I observe also. One is. that there are 
no spruce barmaids, or smiling landladies — stalwart men in 
white aprons supply their place. The second is, that there 
are a multiplicity of doors, many more than would at first 
seem necessary, and for ever on the swing ; but the utility of 
which is speedily demonstrated to me by the simultaneous 
ejection of three ' obstropelous ' Irish labourers, by three of 
the stalwart barmen. 

The trucks and barrows, the fried fish and artificial flowers, 
are not quite so abundant when we have passed a thorough- 
fare called Somerset Street. They become even more scarce 
when we see, on the other side of the road, two stone posts, or 
obelisks on a small scale, marking at once the boundaries of 
the City, and the commencement of that renowned thorough- 
fare now politely called Middlesex Street, but known to Europe 
in general, and the nobility and gentry connected with the 
trade in old clothes in particular, as Petticoat Lane. It is no 
use going down there this Saturday, for the Hebrew com- 
munity, who form its chief delight and ornament, are all 
enjoying their ' shohbhouse,' and we shall meet with them 
elsewhere. We will, if you please, cross over, leaving the 
kerbstone market (which only exists on one side), and allured 
by the notes of an execrably played fiddle, enter one of those 
dazzling halls of delight, called a ' penny gaff.' 

The ' gaff ' throws out no plausible puffs, no mendacious 



264 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

placards, respecting the entertainment to be found therein. 
The public take the genuineness of the 'gaff' for granted , 
and enter by dozens. The ' gaff' has been a shop— a simple 
shop — with a back parlour to it, and has been converted into 
a hall of delight, by the very simple process of knocking out 
the shop front, and knocking down the partition between the 
shop and parlour. The gas-fittings yet remain, and even the 
original counters, which are converted into ' reserved seats/ 
on which, for the outlay of twopence, as many costers, thieves, 
Jew-boys, and young ladies, as can fight for a place, are sitting, 
standing, or lounging. For the common herd — the ol 7ro\\oi — 
— the conditio Vivendi is simply the payment of one penny, for 
which they get standing-room in what are somewhat vaguely 
termed the ' stalls, 5 — plainly speaking, the body of the shop. 
The proscenium is marked by two gas ' battens ' or pipes, 
perforated with holes for burners, traversing the room hori- 
zontally, above and below. There are some monstrous en* 
gravings, in vile frames, suspended from the walls, some 
vilely coloured plaster casts, and a stuffed monstrosity or two 
in glass cases. The place is abominably dirty, and the odour 
of the company generally, and of the shag tobacco they are 
smoking, is powerful. 

A capital house though, to-night : a bumper, indeed. Such 
a bumper, in fact, that they have been obliged to place benches 
on the stage (two planks on tressels), on which some of the 
candidates for the reserved seats are accommodated. As I enter, 
a gentleman in a fustian suit deliberately walks across the 
stage and lights his pipe at the footlights ; while a neighbour 
of mine of the J ewish persuasion, who smells fearfully of fried 
fish, dexterously throws a cotton handkerchief, containing 
some savoury condiment from the stalls to the reserved seats, 
where it is caught by a lady whom he addresses by the title 
of ' Bermondsey Bet.' Bet is, perhaps, a stranger in these 
parts, and my Hebrew friend wishes to show her that White- 
chapel can assert its character for hospitality. 

Silence for the manager, if you please ! — who comes for- 
ward with an elaborate bow, and a white hat in his* hand, to 
address the audience. A slight disturbance has occurred, it 
appears, in the course of the evening : the Impresario com- 
plains bitterly of the * mackinations ' of certain parties ' next 
door,' who seek to injure him by creating an uproar, after he 
has gone to the expense of engaging c four good actors ' for the 
express amusement of the British public. The ' next door * 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY. 265 

parties are, it would seem, the proprietors of an adjacent 
public-house, who have sought to seduce away the supporters 
of the * gaff,' by vaunting the superior qualities of their cream 
gin, a cuckoo clock, and the ' largest cheroots in the world for 
a penny.' 

Order is restored, and the performances commence. s Mr* 
and Mrs. Stitcher,' a buffo duet of exquisite comicality, is 
announced. Mr. Stitcher is a tailor, attired in the recognised 
costume of a tailor on the stage, though, I must confess, I 
never saw it off. He has nankeen pantaloons, a red nightcap 
— a redder nose, and a cravat with enormous bows. Mrs. 
Stitcher is ' made up,' to represent a slatternly shrew, and 
she looks it all over. They sing a verse apiece ; they sing a 
verse together; they quarrel, fight, and make it up again. 
The audience are delighted. Mr. S. reproaches Mrs. S. with 
the possession of a private gin-bottle ; Mrs. S. inveighs 
against the hideous turpitude of Mr. S. for pawning three 
pillow-cases to purchase beer. The audience are in ecstacies. 
A sturdy coalheaver in the ' stalls ' slaps his thigh with -de- 
light. It is so real. Ugh! terribly real ; let us come away, 
even though murmurs run through the stalls that ' The 
Baker's Shop ' is to be sung. I see, as we edge away to the 
door, a young lady in a cotton velvet spencer, bare arms, and 
a short white calico skirt, advance to the foot-lights. I sup- 
pose she is the Fornarina, who is to enchant the dilettanti 
with the flowery song in question. 

We are still in Whitechapel High Street ; but in a wider 
part. The kerbstone market has ceased ; and the head 
quarters of commerce are in the shops. Wonderful shops, 
these ! Grocers who dazzle their customers with marvellous 
Chinese paintings, and surmount the elaborate vessels (Pro- 
perties for a Pantomime) containing their teas and sugars with 
startling acrostics — pungent conundrums. Is it in imagina- 
tion only, or in reality, that I see, perched above these 
groceries, an imp— a fantastic imp, whose head-dress is shaped 
like a retort, who has a Lancet in his girdle, and a micro- 
scope in his hand, and on whose brow is written ' Analysis V 
— that when I read the placards relative to ' Fine young 
Hyson,' ' Well-flavoured Pekoe,' ' Strong family Souchong,' 
4 Imperial Gunpowder,' this imp, putting his thumb to his 
nose, and spreading his fingers out demoniacally, whispers y 
' Sloe-leaves, China-clay, Prussian-blue, yellow-ochre, gum y 
tragacanth, garbage, poison ?' — that, pointing to Muscovado ? 



266 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and 'Fine West India,' and 'superfine lump,' lie mutters, 
' Sand, chalk, poison ?' — that, when I talk of cocoa, he screams, 
6 Venetian-red, and desiccated manure ?' — that, when I allude 
to coffee, he grins mocking gibes of ' burnt beans,, chicory, 
poison ?' — that he dances from the grocer's to the baker's, next 
door, and executes maniacal gambadoes on the quartern loaves 
and French rolls, tittering yells about chalk, alum, and dead 
men's bones ? — that he draws chalk and horses' brains from 
the dairyman's milk; and horse-flesh, and worse offal still, 
from sausages ? — that he shows me everywhere fraud, adultera- 
tion, and poison ! Avaunt, imp ! I begin to think that there is 
nothing real in the eating and drinking line — that nothing is 
but what is not — that all beer is cocculus Indicus — all gin, 
turpentine, in this delusive Whitechapel. And not in White- 
chapel alone. Art thou immaculate, Shoreditch? Art thou 
blameless, Borough ? Canst thou place thy hand on thy waist- 
coat, Oxford Street, the aristocratic, and say thy tea knows no 
4 facing or glazing,' thy sugar no potato starch, thy beer no 
doctoring ? 

But one of my friends is clamorous for beer ; and, to avoid 
adulteration, we eschew the delusive main thoroughfare for a 
moment and strike into a maze of little, unsavoury back- 
streets, between Whitechapel Church and Goodman's Fields. 
Here is a beer-shop — a little, blinking, w T all-eyed edifice, with 
red curtains in the window, and a bar squeezed up in one 
corner, as though it were ashamed of itself. From the door 
of the tap-room which we open, comes forth a thick, compact 
body of smoke. There are, perhaps, twenty people in the 
room, and they are all smoking like limekilns. From a 
kiln at the upper extremity, comes forth the well-remembered 
notes of the old trink-lied, ' Am Bhein, am Bhein.' We are in 
Yaterland at once. All these are Teutons — German sugar- 
bakers. There are hundreds more of their countrymen in the 
narrow streets about here, and dozens of low lodging-houses, 
where the German emigrants are crimped and boarded and 
robbed. Here, also, live the German buy-a-broom girls. 
There are little German public-houses, and German bakers, 
and little shops, where you can get sauer-kraut and potato- 
salad, just as though you were in Frankfort or Mayence, 
Dear old Vaterland ! pleasant country of four meals a day, 
and feather-bed counterpanes — agreeable land, where you can 
drink wine in the morning, and where everybody takes 
off his hat to everybody else ! Though thy cookery is 



DOWN WHITECHAPEL WAY. 267 

execrable, and thy innkeepers are robbers, I love thee, 
Germany, still ! 

My experienced friend, when we have refreshed ourselves 
at this hostelry, brings us, by a short cut, into Union Street, 
and so into the broad Whitechapel-road. Here the kerbstone 
market I have alluded to, crosses the road itself, and stretches, 
in a straggling, limping sort of way, up to Whitechapel 
Workhouse. We come here upon another phase of Saturday- 
night Whitechapel life. The children of Jewry begin to en- 
compass us, not so much in the way of business ; for though 
their Sabbath is over, and work is legal — though Moses, at 
the other extremity, is in full swing of money-making activity, 
yet the majority of the Israelites prefer amusing themselves 
on a Saturday night. They are peculiar in their amusements, 
as in everything else. The public-house — the mere bar, at 
least — has no charms for them ; but almost all the low coffee- 
shops you pass are crowded with young Jews, playing domi- 
noes and draughts ; while in the publics, where tap-rooms are 
attached, their elders disport themselves w r ith cards, bagatelle, 
and the excitement of a sing-song meeting. Smoking is 
universal. Cigars the rule — pipes the exception. Hounds- 
ditch, the Minories, Leman Street, Duke's Place, St. Mary 
Axe, Bevis Marks, and Whitechapel itself, have all contributed 
their quota to fill these places of amusement ; and here and 
there you will see some venerable Israelite, with long beard and 
strange foreign garb, probably from Tangier or Constantinople, 
on a visit to his brethren in England. There are legends, 
too, of obscure places in this vicinity, where what the French 
call ' grosjeu/ or high play, is carried on. In Butcher Eow, 
likewise, are Jew butchers, where you may see little leaden 
seals, inscribed with Hebrew characters, appended to the 
meat, denoting that the animal has been slaughtered according 
to the directions of the Synagogue. In the daytime you may 
see long bearded rabbins examining the meat, and testing the 
knives on their nails. 

What have we here ? ' The grand Panorama of Australia, 
a series of moving pictures.' Admission, one penny. Just- 
a-going to begin. Some individuals, dressed as Ethiopian 
serenade rs, hang about the door ; and one with the largest 
shirt-collar I have ever seen, takes my penny, and admits me, 
with some score or two more, where, though it is ' just a-going 
to begin,' I and my friends wait a good quarter of an hour. 
There are two policemen off duty beside me, who are in- 



268 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

dulging in the dolce far niente, and cracking nuts. There is a 
decent, civil-spoken silkweaver from Spital fields, too, whose 
ancestors, he tells me, came over to England at the time of 
the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and who has a romanti- 
cally French name. He has the old Lyons indentures of his 
ancestors at home, he says. 

We give up the panorama in despair ; and, for aught we 
know, is ' jest a-going to begin ' at this moment. In our pro- 
gress towards the Gate, however, we look in at a few more 
public-houses. Here is a costermonger's house, where the 
very truck and baskets are brought to the bar. Here is that 
famous hostelry, where is preserved an oil-painting, contain- 
ing authentic portraits of three Whitechapel worthies, who 
once drank one hundred and one pots of beer at one sitting. 
The name of the captain of this gallant band was ' Old Fish.' 
Here, again, is a thieves' house- — thievish all over, from the 
squint-eyed landlord to the ruffianly customers. Go in at one 
door, and go out at another ; and don't change more five-pound 
notes at the bar than you can help, my friend. Here are 
houses with queer signs — ' The Grave Morris,' supposed to 
be a corruption of some dead-and-gone German Landgrave, 
and ' The Blind Beggar,' close to Mile End Gate. 

Another ' gaff' on the right-hand side of the road — but on 
a grander scale. The Effingham Saloon, with real boxes, a 
real pit, and a real gallery ; dreadfully dirty, and with a 
dirtier audience. No comic singing, but the drama — the real, 
legitimate drama. There is a bold bandit, in buff-boots, call- 
ing on ' yon blew Ev'n to bring-a down-a re wing on ther 
taray tor's ed.' There is nothing new in him, nor in the 
young lady in pink calico, with her back hair down, expressive 
of affliction. Nor in the Pavilion Theatre over the way, 
where ' Eugantino the Terrible ' is the stock piece, and where 
there are more buff-boots, rusty broad-swords, calico-skirts, 
and back hairs. 

Shops, Gin-palaces, Saloons — Saloons, Gin-palaces, Shops ; 
Costermongers, Thieves, and Beggars — Beggars, Thieves, and 
Costermongers. As we near the Gate, the London Hospital 
looms heavily on one side, while on the other the bare, bleak 
walls of Whitechapel Workhouse stretch grimly along, with a 
woful skirting-board of crouching Irish paupers, who have 
arrived too late for admission into the Workhouse, and are 
houseless for the night. 

Going along, and still anxious to see what is to be seen, I 



THE MUSICAL WOKLD. 269 

look, curiously, at the portraits hanging on the walls of the 
coffee-houses and bar-parlours. The democratic element is 
not YQry strong in Whitechapel, it would seem; for the 
effigies of Her Majesty and Prince Albert are as a hundred to 
one of the effigies of the Cuffies and Meaghers of the sword. 
One portrait, though, I see everywhere ; its multiplications 
beating all royal, noble, and democratic portraits hollow, and 
far out-numbering the Dog Billys, and winners of memorable 
Derbys. In tavern and tap-room, in shop and parlour, I see 
everywhere the portrait or the bust of Sir Bobert Peel. 

Mile End Gate at last, and midnight chimes. There is a 
6 cheap-jack/ on a rickety platform, and vaunting wares 
more rickety still, who gets vehemently eloquent as it gets 
later. But his auditory gradually disperse, and the whole 
road seems to grow suddenly quiet. Do you know why ? 
The public -houses are closed. The pie-shops, it is true, yet 
send forth savoury steams ; but the rain comes down heavily. 
Therefore, and as I (and I fear you, too, dear reader) have 
had enough of Whitechapel for one while, let us jump into 
this last omnibus bound westwards, reflecting that if we 
have not discovered the North- West Passage, or the source 
of the Niger, we have beheld a strange country, and some 
strange phases of life. 



XXIV. 

THE MUSICAL WOKLD. 



It is a world of highly ancient lineage, having existed thou- 
sands of years ago, ' ere heaving bellows learned to blow.' 
Old Timotheus was its master (sub Jove), before divine 
Cecilia came to invent the vocal frame, and add length to 
solemn sounds ; to wrest the lyre from Timotheus, or divide 
the crown with him. He could but raise a mortal to the skies. 
She drew an angel down. 

Thus far (in somewhat different language) glorious John 
Dryden in praise of music. I must not tarry to sing the 
praises of ancient music, for I have not Dr. Burney's big book 
by me : and who knows where or when I should stop if I 
were to touch upon Orpheus and the beasts, Ulysses and the 
Syrens, Nebuchadnezzar with his lutes, and harps, and sack- 
buts, and all kinds of psaltery: or if even I were to get 



270 GASLIGHT AXD DAYLIGHT. 

middle -aged in music, and tell of the troubadours, trouveres, 
minne-singers, or glee-maidens ; or more modern yet, and 
gossip about Stradella, Purcell, Eaymond Lulli and Father 
Schmidt, Paesiello, Handel, and Doctor Blow : the harmonious 
blacksmith, Cremona fiddles, and the Haarlem organ ? 

The musical world of England of to-day, for to such place 
and time will I confine myself, contains in itself three worlds 
— the fashionable world of music, the middle-class world, and 
the country world. 

Fashion first. What so fashionable as the Opera? whose 
many tiers of boxes glitter with bright lights, and brighter 
eyes, with youth and beauty, and high birth ; where divinities 
in diamonds, and divinities in blue ribbons, hedge kings and 
queens (poor hedges ! how wofully tired, and ditchwaterly dull 
they look, hedging royalty on one leg, or leaning wearily 
against chairbacks or brackets) ; where dandies in the stalls, in 
excruciating white neckcloths, turn their backs to the stage 
between the acts, and scrutinize the occupants of the grand 
tier, with their big lorgnettes ; where gray-headed peers and 
habitues who can remember ISTourri and Donzelli, Catalani and 
Pasta, Armand Vestris and Anatole, crouch in shady pit-boxes, 
and hear the music with palled ears, and watch the ballet 
with sated eyes ; where dilettanti in the back rows of the pit 
(mostly admitted with orders, and cleaned white kid gloves) 
are so particular in crying Brava when a lady is singing, and 
Bravi, when a duet is sung ; where honest Tom Snugg, who 
fancies himself a complete man about town and opera fre- 
quenter, is so proudly delighted in pointing out, to his friend 
Xooks, the neophyte, a respectable stockbroker from Camber- 
well Grove, as the Duke of Tiransydon, or the lady of a 
Hebrew sheriff's officer, covered with diamonds, as the Dowa- 
ger Marchioness of Memphis ; where simple-minded English 
people from the provinces, finding themselves in the amphi- 
theatre stalls and at the opera for the first time, make des- 
perate efforts to understand the words of the songs and re- 
citatives ; and failing signally, appeal to the sixpenny ; books 
of the opera,' and find confusion worse confounded by the 
librettist of the theatre ; who translates Italian into English 
with about the same facility that French hotel-keepers trans- 
late their advertisements into the same language ; where olea- 
ginous foreigners, of the back settlements of the gallery, 
gloat over every bar of the overture, and every note of the 
opera, and keep time with their heads, and lick their lips at 



THE MUSICAL WOKLD. 271 

a florid passage, or a well-executed cadence, and grind their 
teeth savagely at a note too flat or too sharp, and scowl at you 
if yon cough or sneeze, or move your feet. This English land 
has not been without its white days — its high and glorious 
festivals. I say has been ; for, alas ! of the opera as agrand, 
glorious, national, fashionable institution, we may say, as of 
him whose sword is rust, and whose bones are dust, — -It was. 
The Grand Opera exists no more. I know there is an establish- 
ment in the vicinity of Covent Garden — a sumptuous, commo- 
dious, brilliant, and well-managed theatre, where the best 
operas are given by the best singers and instrumentalists. 
But I cannot call it the Opera. It can never be more to me 
than Covent Garden Theatre — the conquered, but never to be 
the naturalised domain of Italian music. The ghost of Garrick 
jostles the-ghost of Farinelli in Bow Street, and from Mr. May, 
the costumier's shop, in Wellington Street, the indignant voices 
of Colman, Sheridan, Kenney, and O'Keefe, seem to be crying 
to Bellini and Donizetti, Meyerbeer and Mozart, ' What do ye 
here ?' What have the traditions of maestri and macaroni, 
violins and Vellutis, bassi and ballet-girls to do with a locality 
hallowed by the memory of the Great Twin Brethren, the two 
mighty English theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane ? 
I can fancy, drawn up in shadowy line opposite the grand 
entrance and sadly watching the carriages disgorging their aris- 
tocratic tenants, the by-gone worthies of the English stage. 
Siddonst hrilling, O'Neill melting, Munclen exhilarating, Dow- 
ton convulsing, Kemble awing, Kean astounding, Woffington 
enchanting, Young soothing, and Macready — not dead, haply, 
nor forgotten, nor unthanked, but gone for all that — teaching 
and elevating, and humanising us. About such a scene might 
flit the disembodied spirits of the ' 0. P.' row ; of those brave 
days of old, when people went to wait for the opening of the 
pit door, at three p.m., and took sandwiches and case bottles 
with them ; when the engagement or non-engagement of a 
public favourite weighed as heavily in the balance of town 
curiosity, as the siege of a fortress, or the capture of a fleet ; 
when Shakspeare's scenes found gorgeous reflections in Stan- 
field's magic mirror ; when actors (though rogues and vaga- 
bonds by act of parliament) were wonderfully respected and 
respectable, and lived in competence, and had quiet cosy 
houses in Bloomsbury and Marylebone, paying rates and taxes, 
serving on juries, and when they died found no mortuary 
eulogium in the columns of some slang periodical, but were 



272 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

gravely alluded to in the decent large type of a respect- 
ably small-sized journal, with a fourpenny stamp, as ' at his 
house in Buskin Street, Mr. So-and-so, many' years of the 
Theatre Eoyal, Co vent Garden, and one of the overseers of the 
parish of Saint Eoscius. Universally lamented. An attached- 
husband and a tender father.' No ! The Opera cannot be in 
Covent Garden to my mind. The opera should, and can only be 
in the Haymarket, over against palatial Pall-Mali. Come back 
then, Mr. Costa, whom 1 honour, to those cari luoghi. Come 
back, baton, souffleurs' cavern, loud bassoon, and all. Let us 
have, once more, the linkman with his silver badge, and the 
guard of grenadiers (I mind the time when it was a subaltern's 
guard, and the officer had a free admission to the pit, and 
lounged tremendous in Fop's Alley in his bearskin and 
golden epaulettes). Come back to the Haymarket, carriages 
that stopped the way, and struggling footmen, and crowded 
crush room ! Come back, and let not the walls of the grand 
opera be desolate, or the spider weave her web in the yellow 
satin curtains — though I believe they were taken down and 
sold in the last disasters ! # 

Only one section of the musical world, however, was on view 
in the audience part of the opera. Its working members were 
to be found behind the footlights ; nor could you learn much 
of their private or social habits even there. There are few 
duller, prosier, more commonplace scenes than the green-room 
of a theatre ; and the artist's foyer at an opera-house is ordi- 
narily the dullest of the dull. A prima donna swallowing 
sherry-negus with an egg in it preparatory to her grand scena ; 
& basso stretching himself on the cushions of an ottoman, and 
yawning in an ecstacy of fatigue ; a tenor sulking in a corner 
because his aria has not been encored ; a baritone suffering 
from hoarseness, and expectorating and swallowing cough 
lozenges with distressing pertinacity ; a crowd of mysterious, 
snuffy, musty old Frenchwomen with handkerchiefs tied round 
their heads, pottering in corners with second-hand foreigners, 
who snuff more than they speak, and spit more than they snuff : 
these are the principal features of an operatic green-room. 
Yet, in the palmy days of opera-hats and opera-tights, there 

* The Haymarket Opera — Her Majesty's Theatre— has been born again, 
unci has again died, since I wrote these lines. May the courteous Mr. Lumley 
be again enabled to inscribe ' Kesurgam ' on the hatchment, made from 
an old pass-check, which should properly decorate the architrave of his 
theatre. 



THE MUSICAL WOKLD. 273 

were few privileges more valued by the distinguished fre- 
quenters of the omnibus-box than that of the entree behind the 
scenes. A door of communication used to exist between the 
omnibus-box and the penetralia of the coulisses ; and an at- 
tempt to lock it once caused a riot of the most fashionable de- 
scription, in the time of manager Laporte, and the demoli- 
tion of the door itself by a prince of the blood. There are 
dandies yet who would give — not exactly their ears, but still 
something handsome — for the estimable privilege of wander- 
ing in a dingy ruinous desert of wings and set pieces and cob- 
webby rafters ; of being hustled and ordered out of the way 
by carpenters and scene-shifters in their shirt-sleeves : of 
stumbling over gas-pipes, tressels, and pewter pots ; and of 
being uncomfortably jammed up among chairs and tables, 
supernumeraries bearing spears and banners at one shilling 
per night, property-men with blazing pans of red and blue 
fire, and pets of the ballet gossiping the flattest of flat gossip, 
or intent upon the salutary, but, to a near bystander, rather 
inconvenient exercise known as ; pumping,' which, for the 
benefit of the uninitiated, I may mention consists in standing 
upon one leg, while another pet of the ballet pulls the other 
leg violently up and down — such pumping giving strength 
and elasticity to the muscles. 

Hie we away, therefore, to where we can see the operatic 
world to greater advantage. Here is Messrs. Octave and Pic- 
colo's Music Warehouse. Let us enter and behold. 

In Regent Street is Messrs. Octave and Piccolo's establish- 
ment, the great Bourse or High Change of the Ars Musica. 
Hard by, on one side, is Messrs. Eowdeypoor, Cutchempoor, 
and Weaverbad's India shawl warehouse, which keeps so many 
native artists at Delhi and Lahore employed day and night in 
designing fresh patterns.* Hard by, on the other side, is Miss 
Bricabrac's great knick-knack shop, where a marquis might 
ruin himself in the purchase of porte-monnaies, smelling-bottles, 
tooth-picks, dressing-cases, blotting-books, French clocks, 
point lace, diamond pens, jewelled penwipers, amethyst card- 
cases, and watches no bigger than fourpenny-pieces.j About 
four o'clock during the height of the London season, the road 
in front of these three shops — the shawl-shop, the music-shop, 
and the knick-knack shop — is blockaded by a crowd of carriages, 
the very study of the armorial bearings on whose panels is as 

* They are bankrupt. f She is dead. 



274 GASLIGHT AISTD DAYLIGHT. 

good as a course of Clarke's Introduction to Heraldry, or Mr. 
Planche's Pursuivant-at-Arms. The pavement is almost impas- 
sable for mighty footmen gravely lounging, as it is the wont of 
mighty footmen to do ; the air is perfumed with pomatum and 
hair-powder, and the eye dazzled with plush, vivid aiguillettes, 
and gold lace. 

In Messrs. Octave and Piccolo's shop, among the grand, 
semi-grand, square, cottage, and cabinet pianofortes, the 
harmoniums, melodions, accordions, concertinas, and frutinas, 
the last new ballads, polkas, mazourkas, gems of the last 
opera, &c, decorated with flaming lithographs in colours ; the 
shelves groaning beneath music-books and opera scores, and 
pianoforte exercises, and treatises upon sol-faing ; among 
Erard's harps, and huge red and yellow concert posters, and 
plans of the boxes of the opera and seats at the Philharmonic ; 
among circulars from professors of music, who beg to inform 
the nobility, gentry, their friends, and the public that they 
have just returned from the continent, or have removed their 
residence to such and such a street, where they have resumed 
their course of instruction, or have some equally interesting 
instruction to give ; among portraits of musical celebrities, 
litographed by the accomplished M. Baugniet, and concert 
tickets stuck in the frames of looking-glasses ; among all these 
multifarious objects there circulates a crowd of countesses in 
lace, yea, and of duchesses oftentimes, together with repre- 
sentatives of musical wealth (chiefly female) of every degree, 
from the Princess Perigordowski, who has come to Messrs. 
Octave and Co. to negotiate engagements with the stars of the 
Italian stage for her grand ball and concert next week ; from 
the Dowager Marchioness of Screwdown, who wants some one 
at Octave's to recommend her a first-rate Italian singing- 
master, who will teach the juvenile Ladies Harriet and 
Georgina Skinflint for five shillings a lesson, she having 
recently dismissed their former instructor, Signor Eavioli, 
for gross misconduct — a pawnbroker s duplicate for some de- 
grading article of wearing apparel, we believe boots, having 
fallen from the wretched man's hat, on the occasion of his 
last visit to Skinflint House ; from these pillars of the titled 
world to plump, rosy Mrs. Chippendale, who has ' musical 
evenings ' in the Alpha Eoad, and wants a good accompanyist, 
moderate, a German not preferred. They breathe so hard, 
and smell so strong of smoke, and have such long hair, Mrs. 
C, says. Besides, they injure the piano so, and will insist at 



THE MUSICAL fFGBLB* 275 

last upon playing a ' sinfonia,' or a c motivo,' or a ' pensee ' of 
their own composition, goodness knows how many hnndred 
bars or pages long. Then there is Miss de Greutz, who is 
long, lean, pale, and spectacled. She is a governess is Miss 
de Greutz, but has views towards professing singing on an 
independent footing, and washes to ascertain Signor Pap- 
padaggi's terms (he is the singing-master in vogue), for a 
series of finishing lessons. Pappadaggi will have fifteen 
shillings a lesson out of her, and bate never a stiver; c it soud 
be zi gueeni,' he says ; and valiant Miss de Greutz will hoard 
up her salary, and trot, in her scanty intervals of leisure, to 
the signor's palatial residence in Hyde Park Gardens; and 
should you some half-holiday afternoon pass the open windows 
of Belinda House, Bayswater, it is pretty certain that you 
will hear the undulating of a piano in sore distress (not the 
jangling one — that is the schoolroom piano, where Miss Cripps 
is massacreing the Huguenots worse than ever they were on 
St. Bartholomew's day), and some feeble, though highly orna- 
mental cadenzas, the which you may safely put down as Miss 
de Greutz's repetition of her last, or preparation for her next 
lesson. 

You may observe that the gentlefolks, the customers who 
come here to buy, naturally resort to the counters, and be- 
siege the obliging assistants ; these urbane persons, who are 
not in the least like other shop assistants, being singularly 
courteous, staid, and unobstrusive in demeanour, and not 
without, at the same time, a reasonable dash of independence, 
being in most cases sons of partners in the firm, or of wealthy 
proprietors of other music warehouses, w T ho send them here, 
as the great restaurateurs in Prance do their sons, to other 
restaurants, to acquire a knowledge of the business. They 
have a hard time of it among their fair customers ; a dozen 
voices calling at once for works, both vocal and instrumental, 
in three or four different languages : one lady asking for the 
* Odessa Polka,' another for the ' Sulina Waltz,' a third for 'Have 
Faith in one Another ;' a fourth for ' L'Ange Dechu,' a fifth for 
an Italian aria, ' Sulla Poppa del mio Brik,' and a sixth for 
Herr Bompazek's new German ballad, ' Schlick, schlick, 
schlick.' Yet Messrs. Octave and Piccolo's young men con- 
trive to supply all these multifarious demands, and take 
money, and give change, and indulge their customers with 
commercially scientific and sentimental disquisitions upon 
the merits of the last new r song, and answer — which is the 

t 2 



276 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

hardest business of all — the innumerable questions on subjects 
as innumerable, addressed to them not only by the customers, 
but by the professionals who throng the shop. 

The professionals ! Where are they ? They gesticulate 
behind harps, or declaim from music-stools, or congregate at 
the angles of Erard's grands. They may be heard of in the 
back shop fantastically torturing musical instruments, in the 
hope, perhaps, that some English marquis, enraptured by 
their strains, may rush from the titled crowd, and cry, 
' Herr, signor,' or ' monsieur,' as the case may be, ' write me 
six operas, teach all my family at five guineas per lesson, and 
at the end of a year, the hand of my daughter, Miss Clarissa, 
is yours.' They waylay the courteous publishers, Messrs* 
Octave and Piccolo, in counting-houses — at doors — every- 
where. Octave is a pleasant man, tall, an undeniable judge 
of port wine, and rides to the Queen's hounds. Piccolo is a 
dapper man, who speaks scraps of eveiy European language, 
and is supposed to have been madly in love, about the year 
eighteen hundred and twenty-seven, with the great contralto, 
Madame Eostolati, who married, if you remember, Prince 
PopadochofT: he who broke the bank at Baden Baden, just 
before he shot himself at Ems, in the year '33. 

Here is a gentleman just stepped out of a handsome 
brougham at Octave and Piccolo's door. His hair is auburn, 
curling and luxuriant ; his beard and moustache ample, and 
a monument to the genius of his hairdresser ; he is covered 
with jewellery ; his clothes are of the newest cut, and the 
most expensive materials. He is perfumed ; the front of his 
shirt — lace and studs — is worth twenty guineas, and leaning 
from the window of his brougham, you can descry a kid- 
gloved hand, with rings outside the glove, a bird-of-paradise 
feather, and the head of a King Charles's spaniel. The 
hair, the beard, the moustache, the jewellery, the shirt, the 
brougham, the bird of paradise, and the King Charles all 
belong to Orpheus Basserclyffe, fashionable singer of the day. 

Snarling people, envious people, crooked-minded people, 
of course, aver that Basserclyffe roars ; that he sings out of 
tune ; that he doesn't sing as well as formerly ; that he 
can't sing at all ; that he has a fine voice, but is no musician ; 
that he can read at sight well enough, but has no more voice 
than a jackdaw. What does Basserclyffe care? What do 
people not say about professionals ? They say Joe Nightin- 
gale's mother (he preceded Basserclyffe as fashionable), kept a 



THE MUSICAL WORLD. 277 

coal arid potato shed in Bermondsey ; yet he made twenty 
thousand pounds, and married a baronet's daughter. They say 
Ap Llewellyn, the harpist's name is not Ap, nor Llewellyn, 
but Levi, that he is not a Welshman at all, and that he 
used to play his harp in the streets, sitting on a little stool, 
while his sister went round with a hat for the coppers. They 
say that Madame Fioriture, the prima donna, does not know 
a note of music, and that old Fripanelli, the worn-out music- 
master of Tattyboys Eents, has to teach her every part she 
plays. Let them say on, says Basserclyffe. So that I sing- 
on and sing well, what does it matter ? He is right, If he 
had sung at the Italian Opera — as William, in ' Black-eyed 
Susan,' was said by Douglas Jerrold to play the fiddle — 
like an angel, there would have been soon found worthy 
people and astute critics to whisper — ' Ah, yes, very sweet, 
but after all, he's not an Italian!' He is too sensible to 
change his name to Basserclifn or Basserclifficini. He is 
content, perfectly content, with making his four or five 
thousand a year by singing at concerts, public and private, 
oratorios, festivals, and philharmonic associations, in town 
and country. It is perfectly indifferent to him at what 
species of entertainment he gets his fifteen guineas for a 
song. It may be at the Queen's palace, or in the large 
room of some vast provincial music hall. I will say this 
for him, however, that while he mil have the fifteen 
guineas (and quite right), if those who employ him can 
pay), he will sing gratuitously, and cheerfully, too, where 
real need exists, and, for the benefit of a distressed any- 
body, will pipe the full as melodiously as when his 
notes are exchanged by those of the Governor and Com- 
pany of the Bank of England. He has a fine house ; he 
gives grand dinner parties ; he is an exemplary husband and 
father ; he has no serious care in the world, except for the 
day when his voice will begin to fail him. ' He is beast like 
that,' says Bambogetti, the cynic of the musical world, striking 
the sounding-board of a pianoforte. 

But there has sidled into the shop, and up to the polite 
Mr. Octave, and held whispered converse with him, which 
converse has ended in a half shake of the head on Octave's 
part, a shrug of the shoulder, and a slipping of something 
into the creature's hand, a dirty, ragged, shameful old man, in 
a trailing cloak, and with an umbrella that would seem to have 
the palsy as well as the hand that holds it. This is Graddi. 



278 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

About the time that the allied sovereigns visited England, 
just before the battle of Waterloo, Teodoro Gaddi was the great 
Italian tenor, the king of tenors, the emperor of tenors. He 
was more largely paid than Farinelli, and more insolent than 
Cuzzoni. They talked scandal about queens in connection with 
Gaddi. Sovereigns sent semi-ambassadors to tempt him to 
their courts. He sang, and the King's Theatre was in rap- 
tures. He was the idol of routs, the admired of ladies in chip 
hats and leg-of-mutton sleeves ; he spent weeks at the country- 
seats of lords who wore hair-powder and Hessian boots, or 
high-collared coats and Cossack trousers. He was praised in 
the ' Courier/ the ' Day,' the ' News,' and the 'Belle Assemblee/ 
There is no King's Theatre now. There are no routs, leg-of- 
mutton sleeves, or chip hats left. No ' Couriers' to praise, no 
ladies to admire, no lords to invite. There is no Teodoro 
Gaddi, nothing but old Gaddi, the shabby, broken-down, old 
beggarman, who hangs about the music-shops and haunts pro- 
fessional people's houses. If you ask Gaddi the cause of his de- 
cadence, he lifts up his hands, and says piteousiy, ' MafamiUe^ 
my dear, mafamitte;' but as he notoriously turned all his sons 
out of doors, and broke his daughters' hearts, you can't exactly 
believe that story. Gaddi' s voice is quite broken and ruined 
now ; he is immensely old, and pitiably feeble, but he is full 
of galvanic vitality, and is as shameless a beggar as the Spanish 
mendicant with the arquebus, that Gil Bias met. If you hap- 
pen to know Gaddi, it is very probable that, descending your 
stairs some morning, you will find him, cloak, umbrella, and 
all, sitting somewhere on the bottom flight. ' I have come,' 
he says, s I, Gaddi. I die of hunger. I have no charhons, 
my dear ; give me twopence ;' or, reposing quietly in your 
bed, you may find the curtains at the bottom thereof drawn 
on one side, and be aware of Gaddi, and of his voice mum- 
bling, ' Twopence, cliarbons, Gaddi. I knew your father, I 
have supped with Georges Quatre ; I, Gaddi.' It is singular 
that though Gaddi is always complaining of hunger, he is 
almost as continually eating a pie — a large veal pie ; and as 
he munches, he begs. 'Tis ten to one that half an hour after 
you have relieved him, you will meet with a friend who will 
tell you ' old Gaddi called on me this morning, and asked for 
twopence. He was eating a pie. He said that he was 
starving, and had no coals, and that he knew my father.' 
Gaddi has known everybody's father. 

A quiet-looking gentleman with a sallow countenance, and 



THE MUSICAL WORLD. 279 

bearing a roll of music in his hand, has entered the music 
warehouse while we have been considering Gaddi. He has a 
profoundly fatigued, worn-out, ennuye expression pervading 
his whole appearance. His lustreless black hair is listless, so 
are his small hands, on one of which glisten diamonds of 
price. His limp hat is negligently thrown rather than 
posed on the back of his head. He dangles a listless glove, 
and plays with a limp watch-chain ornamented with dully 
valuable breloques ; his eyes are half closed, and he yawns 
wearily. His chief care seems to be for the butt-end of a 
powerful cigar, which he has left, in deference to English 
prejudices but evidently with much reluctance, on the railing 
outside the shop. He casts a lingering look at this remnant 
through the plate-glass windows, and twiddles his listless 
fingers as though the beloved weed were yet between his 
digits. vTho may this be? Who but Polpetti, not the great 
English, nor even only the great Italian, but the great Euro- 
pean tenor ; the finest Eclgardo in the world ; the unrivalled 
Elviro ; the unapproached Otello ; the pride of the Scala and 
the Fenice, the Pergola, and the Italiens ; the cynosure of 
Berlin and Yienna, and St. Petersburg ; the decorated of 
foreign orders ; the millionnaire ; the Gaddi of to-day. 

So much glory (more than a conqueror's), so much gold 
(more than a Hebrew banker's), has this listless person 
earned by his delightful art. I am not about to say that he is 
overpaid. I would walk ten miles fasting to be present at 
one opera in which he performs. You cannot resist him. 
ion hang on his notes, and your heart keeps time with them. 
And when he has finished you must needs clap your hands till 
they be sore, and yell bravos till you be hoarse, for you can't 
help it, 

Polpetti will not go the way of Gaddi. He has bought a 
fine estate in Italy, some say an island, some say a province, 
whither in a few months he will retire to enjoy the ample 
fortune he has amassed in strange lands — from the banks of 
the Xeva to those of the Thames — from the Po to the Potomac 
— from Liverpool to Lisbon. Twenty years since, and Gia- 
cinto Polpetti was an olive-faced lad, running meanly clad 
among the vines and olives and staring white houses, and 
dusty lanes of an Italian county town. He had an uncle, per- 
haps — a snuffy old abbate, fond of garlic, and olives, and sour 
wine, who wore a rusty soutane, and carried a sky-blue um- 
brella, and could read nothing but his breviary, and not much 



280 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

of that. His uncle's cross old housekeeper may have taught 
him to read, and at ten he may have been consigned to the 
shop-board of a tailor, or the farm-house of a vine-grower, till 
it was discovered that he had a voice — and a beautiful voice 
too — which caused his promotion to a badly-washed surplice 
and the choir of the church ; his vocal duties being varied by 
swinging a censer and tinkling a bell, and making the various 
genuflexions which the service of the mass demands. He 
might have grown up, and gone back to the tailor or the vine- 
grower, or have degenerated into a sacristan, a dirty monk, 
with bare feet and a cowl, full of black bread and sausages, or 
an abbate like his uncle, with a rusty soutane and a sky-blue 
umbrella, but for a neighbouring magnifico, the Count di Nes- 
suno-Denaro, who had no money, but considerable influence ; 
who condescended to patronise him, and procured his admis- 
sion into the Conservatoire of Milan. A weary time he had 
of it there. A wearier still when singing for starvation wages 
at the smaller provincial towns of Italy. A weariest when 
he fell into the hands of a grasping speculator who ' starred ' 
him at Paris, and Milan, and Venice, paying him niggardly, 
and forcing him to work the rich mine of his youthful voice 
as though the ore would never fail. But he emancipated 
himself at last, and went to work in earnest for himself. The 
last ten years have been one long triumph, and Jupiter 
Success has found in him no unwilling Danae. He will retire 
with his millions .(of francs) to his own village in the sunny 
South, among the olives, and vines, and staring white houses. 
He will make his uncle the abbate (who lives still) as rich as 
an English bishop, and build a mausoleum over the grave of 
the cross old housekeeper, and lead a jovial, simple-minded, 
happy life among his old kindred and friends : now exhibiting 
the diamond cross that the Czar of Eussia gave him, and now 
the golden snuff-box presented to him by the Kaiser of Austria. 
Do not let us be too hard upon the ' confounded foreigners ' 
who come here to sell their crotchets and quavers for as much 
gold as they will fetch. Only consider how many million 
pounds sterling a year we make by spinning shirts and weld- 
ing iron for the confounded foreigners ; how many millions of 
golden pennies our travelling countrymen turn by cutting 
canals, and making railroads, steamers, suspension -bridges, in 
lands where we ourselves are but ' confounded foreigners.' 

If I have dwelt somewhat too lengthily and discursively 
upon the male illustrations of the musical world, I beg that you 



THE MUSICAL WORLD. 281 

will not suppose that the fairer denizens of that harmonious 
sphere neglect to visit Messrs. Octave and Piccolo's shop. 
Prime Donne abound, even more than Primj Uomini. Every 
season produces a score of ladies, Signoras, Madames, Made- 
moiselles, and Fraus, who are to do great things : who come 
out and go in with great rapidity. Yonder is Madame Digi- 
talis. She sings superbly ; but she is fifty, and fat, and ugly. 
'Bah!' yawn the habitues. 'The Digitalis is passed. She is 
rococo. Give us something new. 5 Whereupon starts up 
Mademoiselle Crimea Okolska from Tartary (said to be a run- 
away serf of the Czar, and to have been thrice knouted for 
refusing to sing duets with the Grand Duke Constantine) the 
new soprano. But Mademoiselle Crimea (she with the purple 
velvet mantle and primrose bonnet bantering Polpetti in the 
corner), screams, and sings sharp, and pronounces Italian 
execrably ; and the habitues declare that she won't do, and 
that she is nothing after all but the same Miss Crimmins of 
the Eoyal Academy, who failed in Adelgisa six years ago, and 
has been abroad to improve and denationalise her name. The 
rage among the ladies who can sing for being Prime Donne 
is greater than that among attorneys' clerks for playing Ham- 
let. Octave and Piccolo are besieged at the commencement 
of every season by cohorts of foreign ladies, all with the 
highest recommendations, all of whom have been mentioned 
in the most enthusiastic terms by M. Berlioz, M. Fetis, and 
the other great musical oracles of the continent, and all of 
whom desire ardently to sing at the Philharmonic or before 
her Majesty. The manager of the opera plays off half a dozen 
spurious Prime Donne during the months of March and April, 
keeping the trumps for the height of the season. And not 
only to the continent is this prima donna rage confined. Staid 
and decorous English parents hearing their daughter singing 
' Wapping old Stairs,' prettily, send her forthwith to the Eoyal 
Academy of Music. She comes back and sings florid Italian 
scenas. ' Send her to Italy,' cry with one voice her relations 
and friends. To Italy she goes, and from Italy she returns, 
and comes out at the opera, or at one of the fashionable morn- 
ing concerts. She sings something with a great deal of orna- 
ment, but in a very small voice : you may hear the rustling 
of the music-paper, as she turns the leaves, with far more dis- 
tinctness than her song. She goes in again, after this coming 
out, and is heard of next year at the Snagglesgrade Me- 
chanics' Institution ; and soon afterwards she sensibly mar- 



282 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

ries Mr. Solder, the ironmonger, and gives up singing 
altogether. 

Prima donna upon prima donna — never ending, still begin- 
ning, none of them can oust from their thrones the four or 
five blue ribbons of melody, who go on from year to year, still 
electrifying, still enchanting, still amazing us : none of them 
can touch the Queen : the Semiramis of Song : whose voice 
no more declines than her beauty, whose beauty than her 
grace, whose grace than her deep pathos, and soulful declama- 
tion and glorious delivery. Ah, lovers of music, your aviaries 
may be full of nightingales and swans, English and foreign, 
black, white, and pied ; but, believe me, the woods will be 
voiceless for long, long after the Queen of Song shall have 
abdicated her throne and loosened the silver cords of her harp 
of glory. 

For all, however, little Miss Larke, the fair-haired English 
prima donna, holds her own manfully. Her name is Larke, 
and she sings like one ; and her voice is as pure as her fame. 
This brave little woman has run the gauntlet through all the 
brakes and thickets, and jungles and deserts, where ' devour- 
ing tygers lie/ of the musical world. Lowliness was her 
young ambition's ladder, and now that she has attained the 
topmost round, she does not turn her back on the ladder, 

* Scorning the base degrees 
By which she did ascend. So Csesar did — * 

But so does not Miss Larke. She is honourably proud of the 
position she has gained by her own merits and good conduct ; 
but she sings with as much equanimity before royalty as she 
was wont to do at the Snagglesgrade Institution, and has ever 
a helping hand for those beneath her who are struggling and 
weak. There is my darling little Larke by the grand piano- 
forte, blooming in pink muslin, with a neat morocco music- 
case in her hand. Mr. Piccolo has a whole list of engage- 
ments, metropolitan and provincial, for her ; from aristocratic 
soirees to morning concerts ; and she has a list at home of en- 
gagements she has herself received, which she must consult 
before she can accept more. Go on and prosper, little Larke. 
May your sweet voice last a thousand years ! 

But the crowd thins in Messrs. Octave and Piccolo's shop ; 
the carriages drive away to the park; the professionals go 
home to dinner or to dress for evening concerts; and as I 
saunter away, and listen to the strains of a German band in 
Beak Street, mingling with the jarring minstrelsy of some 



music m PAVING-STONES. 283 

Etliiopiana Serenaders in Golden Square, I am obliged to 
confess that the cursory view I have taken of the musical 
world, is but an opuscular one after all — that I have but 
described a worldling having a dozen worlds within it. 



XXV. 

MUSIC IN PAVING-STONES. 



In the Stones of Venice — their Sea Stories and Foundations — - 
Mr. Buskin could find elaborate theories ; could weave from 
them fantastic tissues of Art-thought ; could raise upon them 
cunning superstructures of argument, illustration, dogmatism, 
and beautiful description. Let me try, if, striking the paving- 
stones with my iron heel, I cannot elicit some music from 
them. Let the stones of Eegent Street, London, be my Eock 
Harmonicon, and let me essay to play upon them some few 
bars more of the musical tune. 

Eegent Street is the only boulevard of which London can 
boast ; and though the eight-storied houses, the shady trees, 
the gay cafes, the peripatetic journal-mongers, the bustling 
stalls, the glittering passages, the broad asphalte pavement, 
which give so pleasant and lively an aspect to that magnificent 
promenade which extends from the Madeleine, in Paris, to the 
Bastille — though these are wanting, there is sufficient crowd, 
and bustle, and gaiety, in our Eegent Street, sufficient wealth 
and architectural beauty, to enable it, if not to vie with, at 
least to compensate a foreigner for his temporary exile from 
his beloved Boulevard des Italiens. 

Between three and six o'clock every afternoon, celebrities 
jostle you at every step you take in Eegent Street. The 
celebrities of wealth, nobility, and the mode, do not disdain 
to descend from their carriages, and tread the flags like 
ordinary mortals. Science, Literature, and Law, walk arm- 
in-arm three abreast. Dethroned kings, expatriated generals, 
proscribed republicans, meet on a neutral ground of politics, 
and paving-stones. It is pre-eminently in a crowded street 
that you see that equality which will assert itself at times — 
etiquette, William the Conqueror, and Burke's Peerage and 
Baronetage, notwithstanding. The Queen of Spain has legs 
in Eegent Street, and uses them. The Duke of Pampotter 
cannot usurp a larger share of the pavement than the plebeian 
in a velveteen shooting-jacket who sells lap-dogs. Every 



284 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

gent in a Joinville tie, irreproachable boots, and a successful 
moustache, can be for the nonce the shepherd Paris, and ad- 
judge the golden apple to the most beautiful bonnet, and the 
most beautiful face, whether their possessor be a fashionable 
marchioness or a fashionable milliner. 

Those good friends of ours, the foreigners, who need only 
to know and visit England to take kindly to its streets, 
people, viands, liquors, and import of bullion, have taken at 
least nine points of the law in Eegent Street, these twenty 
years agone. It is refreshing to see these worthy fellows in 
the most eccentric hats, the wildest pantaloons, the craziest 
extravagancies of braiding, the most luxuriant beards ; glisten- 
ing with pomatum, electro-plated jewellery, and boot- varnish : 
swelling down Eegent Street, making the air redolent with 
foreign perfumes and the smoke of foreign cigars ; their wives 
and daughters giving viva voce lessons in the art of wearing 
a bonnet, holding up a dress, and scragging the hair off the 
temples, a V Imperatrice, and all gazing approvingly at the 
numerous indications which Regent Street presents, of England 
being the place for foreigners after all, and Eegent Street the 
locality, par excellence, for foreigners to open brilliant shops 
for the sale of perfumes, gloves, cambric pocket-handkerchiefs, 
Vanille chocolate, ormolu clocks, Strasburg pies, St. Julien 
claret, and patent leather boots. 

Music, above all, hath charms in Eegent Street; and its 
paving-stones unceasingly echo beneath the feet of the denizens 
of the musical world. Music-masters aad mistresses hurry to 
and fro from their lessons ; singers to concerts or into Messrs. 
Octave and Piccolo's music-warehouse ; and a considerable 
number of the stars of the musical hemisphere, walk in this 
harmonious boulevard, merely to see and to be seen. It is as 
incumbent on a musical notoriety, on his return from the con- 
tinent, or the provinces, on the eve or the morrow of a 
success, to show himself in Eegent Street, as for a betting- 
man to clink his boot-heels upon the nobbly stones of Messrs. 
Tattersall's yard. Musical reputations have been won and 
lost in Eegent Street ; and the reigning prima donna dares not 
despise the opinions of its paving-stones. 

What gleams in the distance so snow-white, what is found 
to be on nearer inspection so elaborately embroidered, so 
faultlessly plaited, so free from crease or wrinkle ? What 
but the shirt of the great German basso ; and who can the 
great basso be but Bompazek ? 



MUSIC IX PAVING-STONES. 285 

Xo braces disturb the equanimity of that unrivalled shirt. 
no waistband visits its snowy expanse. In deference to 
established prejudices, Bompazek wears a coat — a coat, mul- 
berry in colour, lined with watered silk, and marvellously 
tagged and braided ; but were he entirely a free agent we 
have no doubt that the sleeves and wristbands, the seams, 
gussets, and bands, of that shirt of shirts would be made fully 
manifest to Eegent Street. He must grieve that he is not a 
TYkiteboy and cannot wear his shirt over his clothes : for the 
shirt is Bompazek, and Bompazek is the shirt. If ever he 
had a palace with stained glass windows, he might paraphrase 
the Cardinal of York's proud motto, and write up, Ego et 
indusium meum — I and my shirt. There is much virtue in a 
clean shirt — a good, fine, well-go t-up shirt : showing plenty 
of collar, front, and wristbands. Many a man has been 
indebted to his washerwoman, not only in the amount of her 
little bill, but for subsequent fame and fortune. They say that 
Tom Gills, who was renowned for wearing the finest collars 
in Europe, and positively devoted a considerable portion of his 
time to cutting out models of shirt-collars in pasteboard for the 
guidance of his registered shirt-maker, obtained his colonial 
appointment mainly through his collars. I wish myself 
that colonial appointments were obtained from the virtuous 
government of this enlightened country for no worse reasons. 
Should we get on much worse than we do, I wonder, if we 
chose our governments themselves for their collars ? 

I have said that Bompazek wears not braces. In lieu 
thereof he is girt with an embroidered belt, — a belt thickly 
sown with rich beads — the gift and work, perchance, of some 
fair Fraulein in Germany, the lady of his love, whom, like 
the Standard Bearer, he dare not name. Bompazek has a beard 
that the Emperor Julian, the apostate, he who boasted of his 
barba longa et populata, would have been proud of. His 
mouth is of an affable, good-humoured cut ; his blue eye 
suggests not violence, pride, ambition, but is suggestively 
eloquent of mild beer and milder pipes. In both does Bom- 
pazek mildly delight. 

Yes. This big, barbated, spicated basso, with the beard of 
a sapeur, the stature of a Colossus, the strength of a Tauridor, 
the lungs of a Stentor, is the mildest, meekest, most placable, 
soft-hearted creature that you can imagine. He is a great 
friend of little children : and though they are frightened at 
first at his tremendous bass voice, they soon venture to climb 



286 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

on his knees, and play with the breloques of his watch-chain, 
and make use of his beard for prehensile purposes, and listen 
to the little lieds he sings them in the biggest 'voice that ever 
yon heard. He is the victim, milch cow, and bete de 
souff ranee of herds of hungry, ragged, disreputable foreigners, 
who come to him with torn and greasy passports, and letters 
of introduction from people he never heard of; who drink 
his beer, smoke his pipes, eat his suet-puddings, sleep in his 
drawing-room, borrow his money, wear even his sacred shirts, 
and call him Dummerkopf for his pains. He is always 
giving or lending money, singing for nothing, subscribing to 
charities. He has always some baufre eggzile whose rent he 
pays, and whose lit is always being taken from under him and 
redeemed by Bompazek. 

it is reported that Bompazek cannot go back to the Grand 
Duchy of Schloss-Schinkenstein, his native place, as he was 
serious implicated in the revolutionary movement of '48 ; and 
the Grand Duke is furious against him. I cannot for the life 
of me conceive to what greater extent this big, harmless man 
could have compromised himself in a political sense than by 
drinking beer out of a conspirator's glass, or giving a pipe- 
light to a democrat. Perhaps his beard went against him. It 
is decidedly the most revolutionary thing about him. 

Bompazek lodges in Great Blenheim Street, where he occu- 
pies the first-floor, and has irretrievably ruined four carpets 
with expectorations. His drawing-room and bed-room are 
one large pipe. The whitewashed ceiling is smoked to a 
golden colour, the walls are covered with the marks left by 
lucifer-matches rubbed against them for ignition ; tobacco-ash 
lurks in the chairs, the keys of the pianoforte, the curtains, 
and the music-books. The smell of tobacco is overpowering, 
but not offensive; it has no time to grow stale — fresh pipes 
being continually lighted. When Bompazek says, ' Gom and 
bipe vid me dis evedig,' you find a table covered with pipes 
of every imaginable form and size, a bottle of hollands, a huge 
porcelain jar of tobacco, and an armoury of pewter pots. Six 
or seven Germans, including Bompazek, range themselves 
round the fire-place, each man wrapped in a dry blanket of 
smoke, and gravely spit the fire out ; the loudest sound that 
is heard being the coughing of Mrs. Pickwinkle, the landlady, 
and her servant 'Melia in the kitchen below. 

Mrs. Pickwinkle does not object to the smoke or the ex- 
pectoration. Mr. Bompazek is so good a lodger, and pays so 



MUSIC IN PAVING-STOKES. 287 

liberally and regularly, says she. But by one of those inex- 
plicable caprices, peculiar to the feminine organisation, she 
has taken violent exception to Bompazek's suet-puddings. 
He is inordinately fond of those indigestible delicacies. So 
are his friends. He eats them for breakfast, luncheon, dinner, 
supper, — for Bompazek, as befits a true child of Fatherland, is 
a four-meals-a-day man. So are his friends, the silent men 
who help to spit the fire out. Mr. Pickwinkle has been on 
the point several times of giving him warning on this irrita- 
ting account. She leads 'Melia a dreadful life about the 
puddings. She explodes on the subject in back-kitchens and 
areas, on staircases and landings, to friends and neighbours. 
I called on Bompazek once. He was out, but was expected 
to return to dinner almost immediately ; Mrs. Pickwinkle was 
in a fury on the pudding grievance. She took me into his 
sitting-room, where, on a table garnished with a cloth burnt 
in several places by hot tobacco-ash, I found a stew and seven 
puddings. 'There/ she cried, 'seven mortal puddings for a 
party as calls himself a Christian ! JSTow, Mr. Penn, can flesh 
and blood stand that ?' Landladies have curious likings and 
antipathies. One begged me to suit myself elsewhere, once, 
because I objected to having four pounds of bacon at a time, 
and didn't like it streaky. She remarked that she had let 
lodgings for five -and -twenty year, and wished to know if I 
considered myself a gentleman. 1 know of a landlady who 
gave her lodger warning — not because he was backward with 
his rent, nor for keeping late hours, or smoking, or carrying 
on — but because he wore such large buttons. She had bore 
with it as long as she could, she said, but she was certain 
them buttons could be no good. 

As Bompazek comes sailing majestically down Begent 
Street, you may remark that there hangs upon his arm, talking 
very loudly and vivaciously, and looking round with a com- 
placently defiant air, as if to say ' This is Bompazek, the great 
basso, and I am his friend,' a very little man in a tremen- 
dously tall hat, which seems perpetually to be on the point of 
overbalancing him. This is little Saint Sheddle, who, as I 
ha^ve remarked in a former paper, knows, and is intimate with, 
everybody in the musical world. Saint Sheddle is one of the 
fifty thousand living enigmas who walk and talk, and wear 
good hats and boots, without any ostensible means of ex- 
istence. Nobody knows how Saint Sheddle lives. He was 
known as Captain Saint Sheddle at Brighton; as Dr. Saint 



288 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Sheddle at Bath ; and I saw his name myself in the ' Vienna 
Fremden Blatt,' as Le Comte de Saint Sheddle, rentier from 
London. I should not be surprised to hear of him, some of 
these days, as the Venerable Archdeacon Saint Sheddle in 
Torquay, or as Shedalli Pasha at Erzroum. 

Meanwhile, Saint Sheddle goes everywhere, and puts his 
legs under innumerable mahoganies. He walks out in the 
park with Madame Perigord's children. He fetched home 
Poskoggi's niece from school in the Avenue Marigny in Paris. 
He dines with Octave and Piccolo when they entertain the 
musical stars at Greenwich or Eichmond ; he is at all Papa- 
daggi's grand Soirees ; he is admitted to Lady Tremoloso's 
musical evenings ; stays whole weeks at her palatial country 
seat, Chromatic Park, and went to Vienna with the well- 
known amateur and friend of artists, Sir Peddler Fugue. He 
is a member of the Jolly Scrapers' Club, a reunion of the 
members of the principal orchestras, held at the Bass-viol, 
Vinegar Yard; it is even reported that he is employed to 
pawn Madame Garbanati's jewellery when that lady, as it 
frequently happens, is in difficulties ; and that he writes all 
TifTerari's letters. It is certain that he has admission to all 
the green-rooms, tickets for all the concerts, and is intimate 
with the mysterious Panslavisco. But how does the man 
live ? What hatter, what bootmaker, what tailor, supplied the 
habiliments ? Where does the massy gold chain come from ? 
Is Saint Sheddle something in the wine trade, or the coal 
trade? Does he deal in pictures, or sell snuff on commission? 

The only business operation in which Saint Sheddle was 
ever positively known to be engaged was when he took the 
Saint Sepulchre's theatre for the performance of Burmese 
operas. We all remember how many nights his season lasted, 
who didn't get their salaries, and what a melancholy failure 
the whole speculation was. Saint Sheddle ran to Portugal 
Street as if he had been running a race. Somehow he didn't 
' go through the court ;' the discovery of his multifarious 
addresses might perhaps have been fatal to him ; but he has 
been going through ever since. If you speak about debts or 
difficulties to Saint Sheddle, he says, ' Debts ! pooh, my boy ! 
Look at me. Five judgments out against me. W^hat's that ? 
Got my protection in my pocket.' And he shows it you. 

The little man is very popular in the musical world. 
He negotiates engagements, arranges with music- sellers for 
the publication of sentimental ballads by the Honourable 



MUSIC IX PAVING-STONES. 269 

Miss A , and polkas by captains in the Life Guards ; is 

the general peacemaker, mediator, and go-between of the 
profession. \Vhen Poskoggi, the composer, maddened by the 
unfounded jealousy of madame his spouse, emptied a plate of 
macaroni upon the piano, and fled his home and household 
gods for ever, Saint Shecldle interposed, sought out the 
unhappy husband at the hotel in Lisle Street, Leicester 
Square, where he had taken refuge, and was playing billiards 
with the despair of Napoleon after Waterloo, and reconciled 
Madanie Poskoggi to her 'horsepond 3 — as she called her hus- 
band. When Mademoiselle Shaddabacco broke her engage- 
ment with the management of the Italian Opera, and retired 
to Dieppe in the sulks, ostensibly because Packerlickey, the 
manager, refused to pay for the expense of a foot-page to 
attend to her poodles, but really because Mademoiselle 
Baracouta, that upstart parvenue — that prima donna of yester- 
day — had created a furore in Nabucodonosore ; it was Saint 
Sheddle who started off to Newhaven by the express-train* 
crossed the briny ocean, cleared away all difficulties, and 
brought the Shaddabacco back in triumph. His evidence on 
the great trial of Packerlickey versus Guffler, on the disputed 
question of the copyright in the music of the ballet i Les mille 
et une Jambes,' was of the greatest value. He has just taken 
the affairs of Madame Garbanati (who has been living too 
last) in hand. When malicious people began to whisper ugly 
things about Miss Linnet in connection with Captain de 
Prance of the Harpooners : who but Saint Sheddle went 
about, defending the young lady every where ? Who but he 
vowed he was present when Miss Linnet boxed the Captain's 
ears, and when old Linnet, her papa (a worthy man, once a 
schoolmaster, but too fond of cold rum and water), kicked the 
captain down stairs ? Who but he declared, striking a 
seraphine in Octave's shop, with virtuous vehemence, that he, 
Saint Sheddle, would call out and fight any man who dared 
to whisper a syllable against the maligned young lady ? 

Adolphus Butterbrod, Ph. Dr., of Schwindelburg, who has 
just passed Bompazek with so low a bow, although the basso 
scarcely acknowledged it, does not like Saint Sheddle : he 
says he is ' an indriguand.' In days gone by, Butterbrod 
was confidential friend and agent to Bompazek, and had free 
right of warren over his pipes, his purse, his puddings, and 
his shirts ; he arranged all the basso's engagements, and 
haughtily told concert-givers that he had ' roged ' — or raised — 

u 



290 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

his terms. But lie was detected in flagrant delict of conspiring 
with Tonner von Heidelburg, Bompazek's enerny and rival ; 
and cotemporary history records that the' usually mild 
Bompazek (the rage of a sheep is terrible) beat the traitor 
violently with an umbrella, and banished him from the 
domains of Pickwinkle for ever. Saint Sheddle is Fidus 
Achates to the big basso now, and the Ph. Dr. would like to 
do him a good turn if he could. 

Place aux Dames ! Eoom for the stately lady in black 
velvet, who meanders gracefully along the pavement. Two 
smaller cygnets, in sea-green watered-silk and laced trousers, 
accompany the parent bird. This is Madame Perigord, the 
renowned contralto, and her youthful daughters. Lesbia 
Perigord has a beaming eye, a robe of silk velvet, long black 
ringlets, a chain of gold, a chatelaine, diamond rings, pearly 
teeth, faultless hands and feet, in little gloves and boots as 
faultless. Lesbia has a voice of liquid honey and passionate 
fire, poising itself for a moment on her ruby lips, and flying 
straightway into her hearers' hearts. Lesbia is a superb 
creature ; but, oh ! I will content myself with Camberwell 
and my Norah Creina — my gentle, simple Ebrah Creina, who 
cannot sing contralto, but can make Irish stew. For Lesbia 
has a temper. Let me whisper it ; a deuce of a temper. Let 
me write it on paper and show it to you privately ; a devil of 
a temper ! I would rather not be Lesbia's sparrow, if I did 
not think my neck in want of wringing. I would rather not 
be one of Lesbia's sea-green children, if I preferred the law of 
kindness to the law of kicks and cuffs. I would rather not be 
Lesbia's maid, if I valued peace of mind or body; and I 
would decidedly not be Lesbia's husband upon any considera- 
tion whatever. 

Madame Perigord was very nearly the death of Piccolo. 
Piccolo suffered much from rheumatism, and happening casually 
to mention the matter to the Perigord, she immediately in- 
sisted on sending to Paris to her doctor, one Mereantori, for a 
certain marvellous embrocation, which would cure Piccolo 
instantaneously. It was no use demurring to Mercantori's 
preparation. It had cured the Perigord when she was like that 
(pointing to a sideboard as an emblem of immobility), and he 
must take it. Besides, Piccolo is so accustomed to do what he is 
asked, that had Madame Perigord proposed sending for a white 
elephant from Siam, and boiling it up into broth as a remedy 
for rheumatism, it is not improbable that he would have 



MUSIC IN PAVIXG-SIOXES. 291 

assented to the preposition. So, the famous embrocation (for 
which Piccolo was to be charged cost price) was sent for from 
Faris. In the course of the week a deal case of considerable 
size, addressed to Lord Piccolo, arrived in London at the 
music-seller's residence, and he was gratified by having to 
pay one pound nine and sevenpence sterling for carriage. The 
case, being opened, was found to contain sundry bottles of 
a dark liquid resembling treacle-beer, several packages of 
mysterious-looking blue-paper tubes, closely approximating in 
appearance to the fireworks manufactured by the Chevalier 
Mortram, and a large pot of pomatum. One of the bottles 
being opened, emitted such a deadly and charnel-like odour 
that Mrs. Piccolo, who is rather a strong-minded woman, 
immediately condemned the whole paraphernalia as rubbish, 
and sentenced it to perpetual penal servitude in the dusthole : 
which sentence was as speedily put into execution, but not 
before a cunning document was found coiled up among the 
supposititious fireworks. This turned out to be a facture, or 
invoice, in which Lord Piccolo, of London, was debited to 
Yicesimo Mercantori, Pharmacien-Droguiste, in the sum of 
three hundred francs, otherwise, twelve pounds sterling, for 
goods by him supplied. Mrs. Piccolo went into hysterics. 
Piccolo was moved to call Doctor Mercantori injurious names ; 
but, as that learned pharmacien and druggist was some 
hundreds of miles away, the reproaches cannot have done him 
much harm. The worst was yet to come. Piccolo was rash 
enough to remonstrate with the Perigord. Miserable man! 
The Perigord incontinently proceeded to demolish him. She- 
abused him in French — she abused him in Italian — she abused 
him in English. She wrote him letters in all sorts of languages. 
She stamped in his music-warehouse and shook the dust from 
off her feet on the threshold. She sent Girolamo Bastoggi, 
Avocato of Turin, to him, who spoke of la giustizia, and 
snuffed horribly. She even sent her mother (the Perigord had 
a mother at that time), a dreadful old female with a red cotton 
pocket-handkerchief tied round her head, and outrageously- 
snuffy. The old lady's embassy was not fertile in conversa- 
tion, but it was dreadfully contemptuous. After expressing- 
her opinion that England was a ; fichu pays,' she looked round 
npon the assembled Piccolo family, said, ' Vous etes toutes des 
— pouah!' snapped her fingers, expectorated, and vanished. 
The unhappy Piccolo would only have been too happy to pay 
the disputed twelve pounds, but Mercantori's demands ail 

u 2 



292 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

merged into the grievous wrong that had been done Madame 
Perigord. She had been touched in her honour, her loyalty, 
her good faith. She spoke of Piccolo as an itifdme, a man of 
nothing, a music-master, a gredin. She mocked herself of him. 

There is a domestic animal attached to the Perigord's es- 
tablishment in the capacity of husband : a poor, weak-eyed, 
weak-minded man, in a long brown coat, who leads a sorry 
life. He is supposed to have been, in early life, a dancing- 
master in France ; and Madame married him (it can scarcely 
be said that he married her) under the impression that he had 
' rentes' or income — which he had not. He fetches the beer ; 
he transposes Madame Perigord's music : he folds circulars and 
seals tickets when she gives a concert. The maid patronises 
him, and his children do not exactly know what to make 
of him. They call him ' ce drole de papa.'' His principal 
consolation is in the society of a very large hairy dog, called 
Coco, over which he maintains unbending authority, teaching 
him the manual exercise with much sternness. The satirical 
say that Madame Perigord's husband dines in the kitchen, 
and varnishes his wife's boots when she plays male parts. 
When she goes to Paris, it is reported that she puts him out 
to board and lodge, at a cookshop in the Marais ; leaving 
him behind while she visits Brussels or the Ehine with her 
daughters. It is certain that she made a long operatic tour in 
the United States, leaving her husband in London, and that, 
as she forgot to remit him any money, the unhappy man was 
reduced to great straits. 

Here come a face and a pair of legs I know very well. 
How do you, Golopin ? Golopin is the first flautist of the 
day. He is almost a dwarf. He is within a hair's breadth of 
being humpbacked. He has a very old, large, white head, 
under which is a little, old, tanned, yellow face. He plays 
the flute admirably, but in private life he squeaks and 
scratches himself. Golopin's chiefest reminiscence, greatest- 
glory, most favourite topic of conversation, is the fact that 
he was once kicked by the Emperor Napoleon. ' In the year 
nine.' he says, ' I find myself called to play of my instrument 
at one of the musical entertainments give by the Emperor and 
King at the Tuileries. Pending the evening, feeling myself 
attained by an ardent thirst, I retire myself into the saloon at 
refreshments prepared for the artists. In train to help myself 
from the buffet, I perceive myself that the ribbon of my shoe 
had become loose. It was justly then the fashion to wear the 



MUSIC IX PAYIXG-STOXES. 293 

calotte courte of white kerseymere, with silk stockings. I 
stoop myself down then to adjust my shoe-string, having my 
back to the door, when I hear itself rolled upon the hinges 
with a movement of authority. Aussitot I receive a violent 
kick in the kerseymeres. I recognised the coup du maitre — 
the master kick. Yes ; it was well him, the victor of Auster- 
litz and Marengo, the crowned of the Pope, the Emperor. I 
raise myself; I salute ; I make the reverence ; I say, i; Sire !"' 
"Ah, M. Golopin," cries the hero, " I demand pardon of you. 
I took you for a caniche — a white poodle dog.''" I have those 
kerseymeres still, my friend !' 

Golopin is a worthy little creature, but is very irascible. 
He boasts of unnumbered persons he has killed in single 
combat abroad, and specially of a maitre d'armes whom he 
vanquished with the broadsword. He has great faith in his 
flute, and generally carries it about with him. At Casserole's 
restaurant in the Haymarket, one evening, having a violent 
dispute with Klitzer, the cornet-a-pistonist, who had bantered 
him into a state of frenzy, he positively struck that big 
instrumentalist in the face, though he had to jump at least a 
foot in the air to do so. He dismissed him with these mag- 
niloquent words, ' Miserable ! You have neither the courage 
of a bug nor the integrity of a lobster. Had I my instrument 
with me I would chastise you.' People have been rather 
chary of bantering Golopin since then. That bounteous, 
kindly, consistent mother Xature of ours, whom we all abuse, 
and yet should be so grateful to, scarcely ever fashions a 
little deformed man but she implants in him a most valorous 
stomach, a high disdain and sense of injured merit, a noble 
pugnacity and irascibility that make it dangerous to ridicule 
and insult him. 

Who is this, that comes riding — not on a whirlwind like 
Mr. Addison's angel (in a Eamilies wig) to direct the storm, 
but on a peacefully ambling bay pony ? It is the well-known 
amateur and ami des artistes, Sir Peddler Fugue. See : he 
has just stopped his little nag, and bends over the saddle to 
talk to Trump, the composer. Sir Peddler Fugue is - one of 
a class not peculiar to the musical world, but common to all 
the artistic professions. There is your fine-art amateur, who 
pokes about studios, and advises you to kill that light, and 
scumble that background, and glaze down that little finger ; 
who has just come from seeing Turpey's grand figure-piece 
for next year's Exhibition : who knows whv the hanging 



294: GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

committee treated Maul so scurvily, and how much Pallet- 
knife is to have for his commission from Slubber, the great 
Manchester cotton-spinner; and when Chizzle the sculptor 
will come back from Kome. There is your dramatic amateur, 
who has the entree to all the green-rooms; who took Madame 
Spinosetti to Kice ; paid for little Katty Tentoe's choregraphic 
education at the Conservatoire ; lent Grogham his Justice 
'Woodcock wig ; lost a few hundreds in the Capsicum Street 
Theatre (under Pepper's management) ; wrote a very bad 
farce that was once played somewhere on a benefit night ; and 
behaved like a father to Miss Haresfoot. There is your 
literary amateur, who was so good as to read over the proofs 
of Professor de Boots's bulky work upon the Integral Calculus 
(a service handsomely acknowledged by De Eoots in his 
Preface) ; who found the money for the ' Comic Economist,' a 
humorous illustrated publication, with contributions by the 
first authors and artists of the day, which had an average 
circulation of twelve weekly, and lived five weeks ; who 
edited the letters and remains of Twopenny the poet (poor 
fellow ! few remains had he to leave save tavern scores, pawn- 
brokers' duplicates, and unpaid washing bills) ; and who is a 
member of the Goosequill Club, held at the Homer's Head, 
Grub Street. There is your musical amateur, the gentleman 
who ogles Euterpe through his ej^e-glass ; goes to all the 
concerts ; hangs about all the music -warehouses ; and is the 
general friend, socius, and adviser of the artists. They are 
worthy fellows, mostly, these art amateurs, having little in 
common with the big-wigged patrons of old, who were wont 
to be addressed somewhat in this poetic strain : — 

Still shall my Muse the noble Mugroore sing, 
Friend of the arts and counsellor of his king, 

— and who paid for servile praise with a purse full of gold 
pieces, just as a provision-merchant would buy a tub of 
far wholesomer Dorset butter. They do not resemble the 
ridiculous dilettanti and cognoscenti of the last century, who 
meddled with artists' private affairs, and wrote them patron- 
izing letters of advice, and suggested an alteration in a stanza, 
which spoilt it, and then left their proteges to starve. Thank 
heaven, Art wants no such patrons now ! The ami des artistes 
of whom Sir Peddler Fugue is a type, likes and frequents 
artistic society for its own sake. 



MUSIC IN PAVIXG-STONES. 295 

Sir Peddler Fugue, Bart., is very long and lean ; and, but 
for the excellent condition and grooming of his horse, and 
that he himself is dressed as a quiet English gentleman, 
instead of a suit of rusty armour, he would bear no inconsider- 
able resemblance to that deathless knight of La Mancha who 
had a rueful countenance. If, again, it be Quixotic to be 
good, and brave, and generous, yet withal a little eccentric, 
somewhat pedantic, and occasionally (when his exquisite 
taste and finished appreciation of Art get the better of him) a 
bit of a bore, Sir Peddler Fugue is decidedly of the same 
mental mould as Cervantes' hero. Sir Peddler has a white 
moustache, grizzled hair, a chin tuft, and wears such spotless 
buckskin gloves, such lustrous boots, and has so noble and 
erect a carriage, that he has several times been mistaken, both 
at home and abroad, for the sovereign of a German principality. 
He is a bachelor, and lives in chambers in the Albany, where 
his sitting-room is hung round with M. Baugniet's lithographs 
of celebrated musicians, and, I verily believe, with a speci- 
men of every musical instrument, ancient and modern, under 
the sun : from David's harp to Mr. Distin's sax-horns : from 
the lyre that Bruce brought from Abyssinia, to Straduarius's 
fiddles and Case's concertinas. The baronet plays a little on 
most of these instruments ; but he chiefly affects a brown old 
violoncello, with which, in the stillness of the night season, 
he holds grim and mysterious conferences : the instrument 
grumbling and groaning then, sotto voce, as if it were the 
repository of secrets which none might hear but he. Far in 
the recesses, moreover, of a gloomy street in the undiscovered 
countries lying between Baker Street and the Edgeware Boad, 
there is a long, low, green-papered room, not unlike the inside 
of a fiddle-case. Thither, twice a week, during certain 
appointed months in the year, Sir Peddler Fugue repairs, 
preceded by his man-servant, carrying the brown old violon- 
cello. There he meets a few other amateurs and professionals, 
reverent men with bald heads and spectacles : Viscount Catte- 
gat (who elevated Miss Bowyer, the soprano, to the peerage, 
like a nobleman as he was) ; Francis Tuberose, M.P. (setat. 80), 
who plays prettily on the viola ; Sir Thomas Keys, that time- 
honoured music-master, who taught music to the princesses, 
and was knighted by the revered George the Third himself; 
and little old Doctor Sharp (Mus. Doc. Oxon.), who wears 
black smalls and gaiters, bless his heart, and composed a 
cantata for the Jubilee, goodness knows how many years ago. 



296 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

When these rare old hoys meet, the wax candles are lighted, 
pinches from golden snuff-boxes are exchanged, voluminous 
music scores are produced, and the veterans plunge into a 
Saturnalia, of which Bach, Beethoven, Mendelsshon, Mozart, 
are ' the high priests. Scrape away, ye valiant old men ! 
Scrape, ye stout and kind old hearts ! There are resonant 
echoes to your harmony, far away ; in drowsy little country 
towns, in remote villages, in German Schlossen, in Italian 
villas, in hot Indian bungalows, where Lieutenant-Colonel 
Chutnee, Major Pepperpot, and Mango the surgeon, may be 
even now scraping tunefully for pure love of art. while 
dissolute Lieutenant Potts is muddling himself with brandy 
pawnee, and Ensigns Pockett and Cue are quarrelling over 
billiards. 

Sir Peddler Fugue lived very long abroad, I believe, before 
he succeeded to the baronetcy. While in Milan, he composed 
an opera, of course, the libretto of which was founded on the 
story of Hector and Andromache, Cephalus and Aurora, or 
some equally dreary subject. It is said to have been pro- 
duced at Civita Vecchia with considerable success as the 
work of the Cavaliere Maestro Pedlero Eugio, Principe 
Inglese. In Italy, the baronet acquired a habit of speak- 
ing his native language with such a foreign accent and 
manner that you are puzzled sometimes to determine his 
English or Italian extraction. 'Beautiful!' is his favourite 
expression. 'I have seen the Coggi/ he says; 'she is 
B-e-a-u-ti-ful ! Your opera, my dear Tromp, is b-e-a-u-ti-ful. 
I shall nevare forget the b-e-a-u-tiful cabal etto in the third act. 
Xo !' Whereupon he lifts his hat in true foreign style, and 
rides away on his ambling pony, to stop or be stopped by a 
dozen more professionals with whom he is on terms of 
intimacy, in his course down Eegent Street. 

Still up and down the paving-stones the celebrities of the 
Musical World pass ; and, like the fashionable lady of Ban- 
bury who rode the white horse, and had rings on her ringers 
and bells on her toes, a man, if he be so minded, can have 
music wherever he goes. 



( 297 ) 



XXVI. 

A LITTLE MORE HARMONY. 

Still must I hear ! Shall the hoarse peripatetic ballad-singer 
bawl the creaking couplets of ' The Low-backed Car ' beneath 
niy window : shall the summer breeze waft the strains of ' Pop 
Goes the "Weasel ' upon my ears, and drive me to confusion, 
while I am endeavouring to master the difficulties of the 
Turkish alphabet ; shall the passing butcher-boy rattle his 
bones, and the theological beggar-man torture a psalm-tune 
into dolorous cadences ; shall the young lady in the apartment 
next to mine string my nerves into the rigours, while she is 
practising i Les Souvenirs de Cracovie,' with that ceaseless 
verbal accompaniment of one, and two, and three; one, and 
two, and three ! Shall music in some shape or other resound 
from the distant costermonger and the proximate street boy ; 
the brooding swallows sitting upon the eaves, and showing me 
'their sunny backs' ; the ill-ground organ in the next street; and 
the beaten tom-tom and execrable caterwauling of Howadjee 
Lall from Bombay ! To say nothing of the deep-mouthed dog 
next door ; the parrot at number eight which is always en- 
deavouring to whistle ' II Segreto,' and always trying back, and 
never succeeds in accomplishing more of the air than the first 
three-quarters of a bar ; and Colonel Chumpfist's man-servant 
over the way, who sings valorously while he cleans his master's 
boots in the area ! 1 say, shall all these things be, and I not 
sing, lest haply my readers think they have already had 
enough and to spare, of my musical reminiscences ! Xo : the 
Musical World shall be again my theme, — a little more har- 
mony my song. 

I will take a morning concert. Say one given in the 
height of the season by Signor Papadaggi, the famous singing- 
master. Papadaggi is a little man, but he has done great 
things. Twenty years ago he came to'England from Leghorn, 
veiy poor and humble. He dwelt in the neighbourhood of 
Golden Square in those days ; smelt of smoke ; was not with- 
out a strong suspicion of garlic ; had many button-up or 



298 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

cloudy linen days, when he slunk rather than walked under 
the defunct Quadrant Colonnade, and made a tremendous deal 
of a clean shirt when he mounted one. Papadaggi was very 
hairy then, and dined off grease, and w T as hand and glove 
with Eiffi the bass, and Earn the tenor, and Taggragati the 
piccolo player. He does not know Eiffi nor Eaffi now. He 
was very down, financially speaking, when Lor Brown, 
banquier of the City, took him up and into Belgravia. This 
laid the foundation of Papadaggi's fortune ; but the super- 
structure was of his own erection. The brightest of his Lamps 
of Architecture was this — he shaved. There was, as you are 
aware, previous to that momentous question, Why Shave ? 
being asked, an almost insurmountable prejudice among 
English respectability against beards and moustachoes. These 
hirsute appendages seemed always connected in the minds 
of the British Pater- and Mater-faniilias with dirt, revolu- 
tion, immorality, poverty, atheism, and non-payment of rent. 
Every great singer, artist, or musician, who happened to 
be the rage, might barely be tolerated in wearing a beard, 
just as fa captain in the Life Guards or a traveller just 
returned from the interior of Dahomey might be ; but to the 
unknown, the poor, the struggling, the ambitious abnega- 
tion of the razor was fatal. ; Papadaggi was wise in his gene- 
ration, and shaved. Not to an utter state of barefacedness, 
however, for he left his whiskers, which were neatly trimmed 
into the form of truncated, and lay on his cheeks like black 
mutton-chops. These whiskers were the making of Papadaggi. 
Pie was no longer a confounded foreigner. He went into the best 
houses, and taught the flower of the British aristocracy and 
moneyocracy. In the banking world he is amazingly popular. 
Eoehanrpton, Putney, and Ham Common, where bankers' 
villas most do congregate, will hear of no other music-master 
than Papadaggi. He has long since abandoned the con- 
foundedly foreign prefix of Signor, and has Mr. I. Papadaggi 
printed on his cards. YV r hen I state that he is a director of 
two assurance companies, has recently been elected a member 
of the Mousaion Club, and has taken to wearing a white 
neckcloth in the daytime, the conclusion will easily be 
arrived at that he has a comfortable balance at his banker's, 
and is a highly respectable man. 

Papadaggi married an English lady, Miss Hammerneli, of 
Birmingham, and though of the pontifical faith himself, will 
send his son to Oxford. He has a tremendous house at 



A LITTLE 3I0EE HARMOKTT. 299 

Tyburnia, with a footman — a real footman, in plush and 
powder. Why did not the paternal Papadaggi, dead in Leghorn 
yonder, live to see the day? P. the Second and Great is a 
little man, but he drives a monumental cab drawn by a big 
brown horse — a very horse of Troy — that moves with a sort of 
swelling cadence of motion, as if he were practising Mozart's 
Requiem to himself. It is good to see honest Papadaggi 
behind the big horse ; a regulation tiger hanging on behind, 
and the music-master's little body gently swaying with the 
curvetings of his steed.* It is good to hear the thundering 
knock of the regulation tiger at the door of number six hundred 
and six a, Plesiosaurus Gardens West, where Papadaggi is 
about to give three-quarters of an hour's singing lesson for a 
guinea. It is good to see Papadaggi toddle out of his cab in 
the lightest of varnished boots, and the brightest of lemon- 
coloured gloves, and to note the respect with which the golden 
footmen receive him, and the easy patronage with which he 
passes them, mounts the stairs, gives his lesson, and lunches 
with Madame la Comtesse and the youthful ladies. 

Once a year, Papadaggi gives his Grand Morning Concert at 
the Xineveh Booms, Arrow-head Street, Cuneiform Square, in 
which rooms, the Xineveh Subscription Balls are given — balls 
to which (without unimpeachable vouchers from the leaders of 
the world) admission is as difficult as of old to the Eleusinian 
mysteries. In the Xineveh Booms, with their huge tarnished 
pier-glasses, w^alls of a pale dirty blue, with cracked stucco 
ornaments, and faded benches and ottomans : wdiich two last 
articles of furniture are no strangers to a certain lively 
insect — the pulex superbus, or fashionable fleas — our friend's 
Grand Concert takes place. For some days previous, the door- 
way of the Xineveh Booms is blockaded, to the profound 
disgust of the Ameliorated Young Men's Table-turning Asso- 
ciation, and the Society for the Protection of Stewed-eel 
Sellers, with, gigantic posting boards, in which a weak-minded 
printer has seemingly gone raving mad in different coloured 
inks and varieties of eccentric type : howling in large 
capitalled prime donne, babbling in fat-lettered instrument- 
alists, melancholy mad in smaller type respecting Papaclaggi's 
residence and the principal music warehouses where tickets, 
price half a guinea each (stalls fifteen shillings), may be had, 
and a plan of the rooms is on view. 

* a.d, 1853. Papadaggi -would ride in a neat little brougham now. 
Private cabriolets are fast becoming numbered among 'things departed.' 



300 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

I don't think it would be an unpardonable vulgarism to call 
Papadaggi's poster a stunner. It literally stuns you, so 
tremendous is its size, so marvellous are the attractions it 
promises, so brilliant are the celebrities who are to appear. 
Papadaggi has everybody. The Opera stars; the famous 
Lurliety, who was a fixed star last season, but has taken it 
into his head lately to become a meteor ; Basserclyffe ; little 
Miss Larke ; Nightingale, of course ; Soundinbord Smasherr, 
the world-renowned Swedish pianist, just returned from 
America ; Madame Katinka Kralski, who plays tunes nobody 
can find the beginning or end of, upon a new instrument, the 
pifferarinium, which has just been patented and completed, at 
the cost of some thousands of pounds by Piccolo, and which 
looks very much like a pianoforte turned inside out ; Herr 
Bompazek, the great German basso ; little Klitz, the flautist, 
who goes everywhere, and whom everybody knows ; and 
greatest attraction of all, the astonishing Panslavisco, that 
Mogul of Harpists, that dark mysterious child of genius, 
whose present popularity exceeds the greatest ever achieved 
by Paganini, the Whistling Oyster, the Hippopotamus, the 
Great Ant-eater, or General Tom Thumb. Besides these, there 
are multitudes of smaller musical notorieties, native and 
foreign, vocalists and instrumentalists : from the Misses Gooch, 
of the Eoyal Academy of Music, the pleasing ballad singers, 
to hard-working Tom Muffler, who means to do something 
with the big drum yet. 

I am afraid the beneficiare does not pay many of his artists. 
You see he is so fashionable, so run after, that it is rather an 
honour than otherwise to sing for him gratis. The Misses 
Gooch can truly affirm themselves to be of the nobility's 
concerts when they go starring round the provinces in the 
autumn after they have sung for a year or two at P.'s Grand 
Musical Festival. A great many professionals sing for Papa- 
daggi through pure friendship and goodwill, for the little 
man is universally liked and respected. A great many sing 
because others sing, and a great many more because they 
want to be heard at any risk. The bird that can sing and 
won't sing is a vara avis, I never knew a bird that could 
sing but that would sing, whether his hearers liked it or not ; 
and I even know a great many birds that can't sing and 
oughtn't to sing, who will sing. Papadaggi, however, does 
not get all the professionals gratuitously. Orpheus Basser- 
clyffe, with whom fifteen guineas for a song is as much a fixed 



A LITTLE MORE HARMONY. 301 

idea as the cultivation of his garden was with Candide, says, 
' I'll sing, by all means, but I must have the cash. Pap, my 
hoy:' and Pap pays him : while old Grabbatoni. the renowned 
performer on the violoncello, contents himself with saying 
every year as he pockets his eight guineas. ' Next year, mio 
caro, I play for noting — for noting — yes!' but, somehow or 
other, with Grabbatoni that next year never comes. 

We will suppose the momentous day to have arrived, and 
Papadaggi's Grand Concert to have commenced. The car- 
riages of the nobility and gentry, and the cabs of the public 
in general, block up N ineveh Street ; the coachmen doze on 
their boxes ; the neighbouring public-houses are full of the 
silken calves and gilt-knobbed sticks of the splendid footmen. 
Within, the ladies are ranged upon the faded ottomans — a 
beautiful show. There are peeresses, bishopesses. judgesses, 
bankeresses, baronetesses, stock-brokeresses. and merchant- 
princesses. Papadaggi has just handed a duchess to a seat ; 
and is at this moment whispering soft compliments to a 
cabinet-ministress, with admirable equanimity and self-pos- 
session. The whiskers are resplendent ; the boots shine 
like patent-leather stars accidentally fallen from Bootes. The 
room is very full and very hot. and many of the dandies, 
unable to find seats, lean their all-round collars against walls, 
so to support their weary frames. A vicious family from 
Peckham Eye (a mamma, three daughters, an aunt, and a 
melancholy governess ) have fallen upon and utterly routed an 
imbecile young man in a feeble white neckcloth, who acts as 
check-taker for the stalls, and who holds a crimson worsted 
cord across the space between the last ottoman and the wall. 
The vicious family have only tickets for the back seats ; but, 
having thoroughly demolished the imbecile young man men- 
tally, and driven him before them like chaff before the wind, 
they make a razzia into the stalls, and nearly overthrow a stock 
broker's colony from Maida Hill, the members of which gather 
themselves up indignantly, and whisper among themselves 
de sparingly, ' City people !' Old General Jupp. who has sent 
his family to the concert before him, and has walked down 
from the Cutcherry Club, has found that he has left his ticket 
behind him. and has had to pay over again at the doors, and 
can't find his party, and sits apart in a corner on a cane-- 
bottomed chair, muttering horribly. A meek-eyed young 
dandy, who has come in cloth boots, with his hair curled (he 
must be an only son with a taste for music, who fancies he 



302 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

can sing second in a quartett), can't find Thrumrner, the 
musical clerk in the Treasury, who sings, 'The Wolf' so 
capitally, and who promised to point out all the musical cele- 
brities to him. He cannot, indeed, find anybody that he 
knows, nor a place anywhere, and is repining secretly on 
the staircase, where he looks so miserable, that the money- 
taker, a florid man who officiates as a waiter at the London 
Tavern o' nights, and sometimes takes a spell in the black 
work, or undertaking line of business, compassionates him, and 
is half-inclined, were he not so great a dandy, to offer him 
some of the beer from the pint pot under his chair. There are 
a great many foreigners in the concert-room, who come with 
free admissions, as it is the custom of musical foreigners to 
do ; two or three critics attached to the morning newspapers, 
who listen to the songs with a knowing air and their heads 
on one side, as if they knew perfectly well what the next bar 
was to be ; and a country gentleman, who has come up to 
town to attend a meeting of the Ameliorated Young Men's 
Table-turning Association, and has blundered into Papadaggi's 
concert-room by mistake, where he sits listening to the per- 
formances with a bewildered air. 

Papadaggi's concert proceeds swimmingly. To be sure, the 
order of the programme is not strictly observed — the song 
that should be first frequently coming last, and vice versa. 
Such misadventures will, however, happen in the best regu- 
lated morning concerts. Codlinetti, the Italian buffo-singer, 
who is of a capricious and changeable temperament, suddenly 
changes the song for which he is put down, to one of an 
entirely different character : to the indignation of Peddle, 
who is the accompanyist (presides at the pianoforte we be- 
lieve is the appropriate words), who is a morose man, and 
insists upon playing the symphony in the original song ; 
upon which Codlinetti, under shadow of turning over the 
music and showing Peddle the proper place, manifests a 
strong desire to fling him over the orchestra among the 
duchesses. Fraulein Kinni Stolzappel, the charming warbler 
of German Lieds, has likewise objected to the unfortunate 
man's accompaniment to her song, and at the end of a 
cadence, and in a voice audible even to General Jupp in the 
comer, has called Peddle ' Pig/ in the German language ; 
whereat life becomes a burden to Peddle, and as he pounds 
the keys as though they were his enemies, he devoutly wishes 



A LITTLE MOKE HAEMONY. 303 

that he were back in his quiet attic in the Boyal Academy of 
Music, Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. Papadaggi neither 
plays nor sings. He is too learned to do anything ; but he 
hovers about the orchestra, and hands singers on and off, and 
pervades the concert with his whiskers and white neckcloth 
■ — so that a considerable portion of the applause is meant 
for Papadaggi, and is by Papadaggi taken unto himself with 
many bows and smiles. Did you never know people who 
somehow seem to have a vested interest in the fruits of every- 
body's labours ? There is scarcely a great picture painted, a 
book written, a palace built, a good deed done, but it turns 
out that somebody is entitled to considerable praise, or must 
be honourably mentioned in connection with it, though as far 
as your judgment went he never put a finger to the work, or 
a stone to the edifice. The number of unknown benefactors 
and passive great men is astonishing. I see their names in 
the literary pension-list ; I find Parliament making them 
grants every session ; I hear their healths proposed at public 
dinners, and see them get up, covered with modesty, to 
return thanks, when they bashfully allude to the things they 
have been instrumental in carrying out, though for the life of 
me I can't make out what they ever had to do with anything. 
What the green-room is to the theatre, the robing-room to 
the assize court, the vestry to the church; so is the singers' 
room to the concert-hall. But, far more elegant, sprightly, 
and amusing, than the dramatic green-room, is the ' profes- 
sional room' behind the ragged leaves of the screen at the 
bottom of the steps of the orchestra at Papadaggi' s conceit. 
There are no garish gas-lights here, no tinselled dresses : no 
rouge, bismuth, jaded faces, pantomime masks — no passing 
carpenters and call-boys : — all is fresh, sparkling, and gay. 
Fresh flowers, rosy bonnets, and rosier faces, cleanest of 
shirts, smartest of female toilettes, newest of white kid gloves, 
most odoriferous of scents. I don't pretend to know much 
about female fashions, though I have occasionally studied 
that sphinx-like journal the ' Follet ' — every flounce in which 
is. an enigma — with fear and trembling. I don't pretend to 
know much about dress ; but I do think that the best dressed 
ladies in creation are the female singers at a morning concert.. 
They unite the prettiest portions of the English and French 
styles of costume. They dress their hair exquisitely, and 
display their little jewelleries inimitably. There is a whole 
art in making the most of a ring, a brooch, a bracelet. I 



304 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

have seen born ladies covered with gems, on whom they pro- 
duced no more elegant effect than a bright brass knocker 
would on a pigstye door. And, more than all this, my 
musical belles have the unmistakable appearance of having 
dressed themselves, and are ten times smarter, neater, prettier 
for it, scorning the adventitious femme-de-chambre. There is 
a table covered with fruit and wine in the singers' room. I 
regret to see Tom Muffler sitting thereat. Tom is not given 
to drinking ; but, when drink is given to him, he exceeds. 

Who is that strange wild man lying dislocated over, rather 
than sitting upon, an ottoman, his long fingers twined to- 
gether, his eyebrows bent into the form of a horse-shoe, his 
puissant head bent down ? That is Panslavisco the harpist. 
The trumpet of fame is braying his name out to all Europe, 
like an impetuous, inconsiderate trumpet as it is, blowing for 
dear life to make up for lost time. He is deaf to Fame's 
trumpet. Fortune is pelting him with golden marrow-bones. 
He heeds not Fortune. She has pelted him with bones with- 
out any gold or marrow in them before now. He stands, and 
walks, and works, and lives alone : he and his harp, for they 
are one. The professionals say he is dull. The ladies say 
he is a brute. The multitude cry ' lo Panslavisce ! Evoe Pan- 
slavisce!' as they would to Bacchus. He lets them cry on. 
He plays his harp, and there is silence, and a wild tumult at 
the end ; and then he receives his money, sees his harp put 
into a green-baize cover, and carried off by a dun-bearded 
man as mysterious as his master, and goes away. No con- 
cert is complete without him. In town and country he is 
sure to draw. He has no intimates, no places of resort save 
a mouldy cigar-shop — where he sits as silent, and apparently 
as immovable, as one of the tobacco-chests — and a dreary 
public-house in a court up Hrury Lane, where he drinks 
large quantities of beer, tacitly. He speaks seldom, and then 
he does not seem to be quite certain in his mind as to which 
is his mother-tongue, and his speech is a garbled compromise 
of many* languages. Indeed, nobody knows for certain of 
what nation he is. Some say he is an Italian, some say he is 
a German, some say he is a Dane. His harp is of all nations, 
and speaks all languages. Of course there are grim reports 
about, of his having killed men, and negotiated a psychical 
investment in an unholy office. His wealth is. put down at a 
fabulous amount, his crimes as unutterable. Little Miss 
Larke, who is a brave body, as valorous as the young lady 



A LITTLE MOKE HAKMONY. 305 

whose virgin smile lighted her safely through the Green Isle, 
once took courage to ask Panslavisco how he did. ' As well,' 
he answered, * as a man can be, who is eating his own liver.' 
He looks indeed as if he were Prometheus, and, wishing to be 
alone, had contracted to do the vulture's work vicariously. 

Little Saint Sheddle, who lives no one knows how, but is 
the very Captain Cook of the musical world, is supposed to 
be the only man in Europe who has been sufficiently ad- 
mitted to Panslavisco's intimacy to dine with him. Pie de- 
scribes these dinners as if he were telling a ghost story. The 
table, he says, is garnished with two plates, two pots of 
porter, and one steak in a dish. Panslavisco cuts the steak 
into two exact portions ; takes one half, pushes the other 
half towards Saint Sheddle, and falls-to without saying a 
word. After dinner he produces a cigar-box and a bottle of 
Hollands, and smokes and drinks prodigiously, but with little 
more conversation ; then he will get up and go out, or go to 
bed, or begin to play his harp wildly — all in a speechless 
manner. 4 It's something to say one has dined with him,' 
whispers Saint Sheddle, i but it's very queer.' 

Panslavisco lies upon his ottoman, profoundly immobile 
until it is nearly time for him to play. Then he begins to 
pat and smooth down his harp, as a man would adjust the 
girths of a wild horse he was about to ride. His turn in the 
programme arrives ; the harp is carried into the orchestra ; 
he follows it ; throws his long sinuous hair back ; sweeps his 
bony fingers over the strings, and begins to play. A wild 
horse and his rider are no bad images for him and his harp. 
He seems to ride upon it : to bestride it as a witch would a 
broomstick, making the air awful with the melody of a 
demoniacal Sabbath. He bows his head to the applause when 
he has done, more as if the blast of a tempest had smote him 
upon the head and compelled him to bow it, than in reverence. 
Now he is gone, and the audience begin to breathe again, and 
whisper 'Wonderful!' He goes back to the singers' room, 
drinks one glass of wine, swallows a biscuit as though it were 
a pill, and falls into a stony sleep upon the ottoman, passive, 
inert, unstrung, as though he had been broken on a wheel of 
wild melody. 

This man, with the sinewy vigorous frame worn into rocks 
and caverns of bone, as if by the volcanic upheaving of his 
soul within ; with the huge, Medusa-like head ; the swelling 
veins in his forehead ; the eyes like abysses ; the face seamed, 

x 



& 



306 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and scarred, and worn in tempests of study, hunger, cold, and 
misery, looks as if lie had newly come from some combat 
with the demon, and had been victorious, but had suffered 
horribly in the fray. A dozen years ago Pansiavisco had as 
much genius, and played as learnedly, sweetly, gracefully, 
boldly, nervously, wildly, as he does now. But he played in 
a garret, where he had no friends, no fire, no body-linen, no 
bread, and where his landlady bullied him for his rent. 
Viragos spuabbling over a disputed right in a wash-tub in a 
back-slum, have heard as fascinating harmonies through a 
garret window held up by a bundle of fire-wood, as princesses 
of the blood hear now in the Nineveh Kooms. Pansiavisco 
has taught the harp to butchers' daughters for scraps of meat ; 
has fiddled in low dancing-rooms, and played the pianoforte 
at quadrille-parties, for a morsel of bread. Now, they are all 
come. Fortune, fame, sycophants to admire, beautiful women 
to smile, lords to say ' Come and dine.' They are all too late. 
They cannot bring back the young wife, dead in a long slow 
agony ; the little children who faded one by one ; they cannot 
bring back the time when the man had a heart to love and 
hope, and was twenty-one years of age. 

But Heaven be good to us all. What have I to do with 
this, unless to say with Montaigne, ' Que sais-je V If I go to 
a concert, and pay half a guinea to hear a man play upon a 
harp, am I to dogmatise upon his inward feelings or his life ? 
For all I know, Panslavisco's morose, mysterious exterior may 
be but a fastidious envelope, and he may be, after all, a 
cheery, happy man. I hope so. 

The last concerted piece in the programme has been per- 
formed, and the critics go home to write out their opinions 
on Papadaggfs grand morning concert. Much bonnet-adjust- 
ing, music-hunting-for, and a little flirtation, take place in 
the singers' room. The imbecile young man falls savagely 
upon the remnants of the wine and biscuits, and becomes 
maudlin in a moment. Papadaggi flits about joyfully with a 
cash-box, and a slave of the lamp follows him with the check- 
boxes. The concert is over. Papadaggi asks the stars of the 
afternoon to come home and dine with him. Some accept ; 
some plead other engagements. He wakes Pansiavisco, and 
asks him. The harpist does not decline the invitation cate- 
gorically. He simply says ' Pay me, and let me go.' 

Let me go too. Licet ? 



( 307 ) 



XXVII. 

GIBBET STREET. 

The Ghetto is for the Jews, and the Eanal for the Greek 
merchants, the Cannebiere for the Marseilles boatmen, and 
the Montague Sainte Genevieve for the rag pickers. Holy- 
well Street is for the old clothes vendors, Chancery Lane for 
the lawyers, Fifth Avenue for the upper Ten Thousand, 
and Gibbet Street is for the thieves. They reside there, 
when in town. 

It is an ugly name for a street, and an uglier thing that the 
street should be a den of robbers; but — with the slightest 
veil of the imaginatively picturesque so as to wound nobody's 
sensitive feelings — it exists. Gibbet Street and the thieves — 
the thieves and Gibbet Street — are as manifest and apparent as 
the sun at noonday. Gibbet Street is just round the corner. It 
is only five minutes 5 walk from the office of 'Household Words.'* 
It is within the precincts of the police-station and the police 
courts of Bow Street. It is within an easy walk of the 
wealthy Strand ; with its banking-houses, churches, and 
Exeter Hall. It is not far from the only National Theatre 
now left to us, where her Majesty's servants are supposed to 
hold the mirror up to nature nightly ; and veluti in specu- 
lum might be written with more advantage over the en- 
trance to Gibbet Street, than over the proscenium of the 
play-house ; for vice and its image are in view there at any 
hour of the day or night : a comfortable sight to see. Gibbet 
Street is contiguous to where the lawyers have their chambers, 
and the high Courts of Equity their sittings ; and a bencher 
from Lincoln's Inn might stroll into Gibbet Street in the 
spare ten minutes before the Hall dinner, and see what nice 
work is being cut out for the Central Criminal Court there ; 
while an inhabitant of Gibbet Street, too lazy to thieve that 
day, might wander into the Inn, and see the Lord High 
Chancellor sitting, all alive, in his court, and saying that he 
will take time to consider that little matter which has been 
under consideration a trifle less than seventeen years. f A 

* a.d. 1855. 
. t Such, scandalous delays existed when I wrote this paper. Such delays, 
I am glad to acknowledge, exist, save in very rare cases, no longer. 

x 2 



308 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

merry spectacle to view. The Queen herself comes within, 
bowshot of Gibbet Street many times during the fashion- 
able season, when it pleases her to listen to the warblings of 
her Eoyal Italian Opera singers. The tips of the blinkers of 
her satin-skinned horses were seen from Gibbet Street ; the 
ragged young thieves scampered from it to stare at her em- 
blazoned coaches ; and, if one of the ethereal footmen — trans- 
cendant being in the laced coat, large cocked hat, bouquets, 
and golden garters — had but run the risk of a stray splash 
or two of mud on his silk stockings, or a stray onion at his 
powdered head, or a passing violence to his refined nose, he 
might have spent an odd quarter of an hour with great profit to> 
himself in Gibbet Street : better, surely, than bemusing him- 
self with beer at the public-house in Bow Street. He would 
have seen many things. Been eased, probably, of his gold 
headed stick, his handkerchief, his aiguiliettes, and his buttons- 
with the crown on them ; and, on his return, he might have- 
told the sergeant flunkey, or the yeoman footpage, or the- 
esquire shoeblack, or the gentleman stable-boy, of the curious- 
places he had visited. The Lord Great Chamberlain might 
hear of it eventually. It might come to the ears of Majesty at 
last. For the first time, I wonder ? Is anything of Gibbet 
Street and its forlorn population known in palatial Pimlico ? 
Perchance : for hard by that palace, too, there are streets full 
of dens, and dens full of thieves. Do not Hulk Street and 
Handcuff Eow, and Dartmoor Terrace and the Great Ticket- 
of-Leave Broadway, all abut upon Victoria Street, Westmin- 
ster ; and is not that within sight of the upper windows of 
the palace of Buckingham ? 

It is plain to me that a thief must live somewhere. He is 
a man like the rest of us. His head has a cranium, an os 
frontis, a cerebellum, and an occiput, although it be covered 
by a fur cap, and decorated with Kewgate ' aggerwators, ? 
instead of a shovel hat or a velvet cap with pearls and straw- 
berry leaves. He is a ragged, cleboshed, vicious, depraved y 
forsaken, hopeless vagabond ; but he has a heart, and liver, 
and lungs : he feels the summer's sun and the winter's ice. 
If you prick him, he bleeds ; if you beat him, he cries out • if 
you hang him, he chokes; if you tickle him, he laughs. He 
requires rest, food, shelter — not that I say he deserves them, 
but he must have them — as well as the best of citizens and 
ratepayers. Ferocity, dishonesty, are not the normal state. 



GIBBET STREET. 309 

A lion cannot be always roaring, a bear cannot be always 
hugging ; and, unless you make of every thief caput lupinum, 
and shoot him down wherever you find him, he must have his 
den. his hole, or his corner ; his shinbone of beef, or his slain 
antelope. Being human, he is also gregarious ; and thus 
Gibbet Street. If you leave holes, the foxes will come and 
inhabit them ; if you suffer heaps of rubbish to accumulate, 
the bats and dragon-flies will make them their habitation ; if 
you banish the broom from your ceiling corners, the spiders 
will come a-building there ; if you flush not your sewers, the 
rats will hold high holiday in them ; and if, to make an end 
of truisms, you are content to bear with rottenness and dirt in 
the heart of the city that has no equal, on the skirt of your 
kingly mantle a torn and muddy fringe ; if your laws say, 
Dirt, you are an institution, and Vermin, you are vested, and 
Ignorance, you are our brother ; if you make and keep up, and 
sweep and garnish a Thieves' Kitchen, with as much care and 
precaution as if it were a diplomatic mission to Ashantee, or 
a patent place, or an assistant commissionership, why the 
thieves will come and live in it. Y\ nich is the greatest 
scandal— a house infested with vermin, or the carelessness of 
the servant who has suffered them to accumulate there ? 
Gibbet Street is a scandal — a burning shame ; but it is not 
half so scandalous or shameful as the governmental dwellers 
in Armida's garden, who have suffered the foul weeds to grow 
up ; who have yawningly constructed succursal forcing-houses 
for crime and ignorance, and have had a greenhouse in every 
gaol, and a conservatory in every Gibbet Street. They may 
say that it is not for them to interfere : some of them interfere 
to obstruct national education ; others interfere to manufac- 
ture pet hypocrites in gorgeous gaols. 

I notice that the principal argument of the police before the 
magistrates when they wish to put down a penny theatre, a 
penny dancing saloon, concert-hall or beershop, lies in the 
fact of the place inculpated being a resort for thieves and the 
worst of characters. Bless me, good Mr. Superintendents and 
Inspectors, astute and practical as you are, where are the 
thieves to go ? What are they to do in the small hours ? Is 
the Clarendon open to them ? Would they be welcome at 
the Sacred Harmonic ? Would Mr. Albert Smith be glad to 
see them at the Egyptian Hall ? Are their names down 
for the house dinners at the Garrick or the Carlton? You 
will have none of them even in your prisons or hulks, 



310 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

but you turn them out with tickets of leave as soon as 
they have imposed on the chaplain with sham repentance ; 
or as soon as your gamut of reclaiming" measures has 
been drummed over. You empty them on the streets, and 
then, wall-eyed, moon-struck Society holds up its hands 
and gapes, because astute Superintendent X., practical In- 
spector Z., tells you that the thieves are gone back to 
Gibbet Street ; that they are ' forty thieving like one ' at the 
corner ; and that they are careering about with life-preservers, 
chloroform-bottles, crow-bars, and skeleton keys. Where else 
should they go? Where can they go ? 'Where!' echo the 
six hundred and fifty-six slumberers in Armida's Garden, 
waking up from a sodden trance ; ' but what a shocking place 
this Gibbet Street is ! We shall really have to move for leave 
to bring in a bill some day to put it down : meanwhile, let us 
never, no never, give a thought to the practicability of putting 
down thieves or thieving by moving one finger, by making 
one snail's footstep towards the discountenance and destruc- 
tion of the teeming seed from which crime is grown,'- — seed 
colported and exposed as openly as the rhododendrons or ra- 
nunculuses in the little brown paper bags in Co vent Garden 
Market ; seed that, with our eyes shut, and with a dreamy 
perseverance in wrong-doing, we continue scattering broad- 
cast over the fields ; afterwards spending millions in steam- 
ploughs of penal laws, and patent thrashing-machines of 
prison discipline, and improved harrows of legislation, and 
coercive drains, and criminal subsoiling ; all for the furtherance 
of the goodly gibbet harvest. What is the good of throwing 
away the cucumber when you have oiled, and vinegared, and 
peppered, and salted it? Why don't you smash the cucumber- 
frames ? W 7 hy don't you burn the seed ? Hang me all the 
thieves in Gibbet Street to-morrow, and the place will be 
crammed with fresh tenants in a week ; but catch me up the 
young thieves from the gutter and the doorsteps ; take 
Jonathan Wild from the breast ; send Mrs. Sheppard to Bride- 
well, but take hale young Jack out of her arms ; teach and 
wash me this unkempt vicious colt, and he will run for the 
Virtue Stakes yet ; take the young child, the little lamb, 
before the great Jack Sheppard ruddles him and folds him 
for his own black flock in Hades ; give him some soap instead 
of whipping him for stealing a cake of brown Windsor ; teach 
him the Gospel, instead of sending him to the treadmill for 
haunting chapels and purloining prayer-books out of pews ; 



GIBBET STREET. 311 

put him in the way of filling shop-tills, instead of transport- 
ing him when he crawls on his hands and knees to empty 
them ; let him know that he has a body fit and made for some- 
thing better than to be kicked, bruised, chained, pinched with 
hunger, clad in rags or prison grey, or mangled with gaoler's 
cat ; let him know that he has a soul to be saved. In God's 
name, take care of the children, somebody; and there will 
soon be an oldest inhabitant in Gibbet Street, and never a 
new one to succeed him ! * 

It is the thieves that made the place, not the place the 
thieves. Who offers to build a new Fleet Prison, now arrest 
on mesne process is abolished ? Is not Traitors' Gate bricked 
up now that acts of attainder are passed no more ? Would 
not the Lord Mayor's state-coach be broken up and sold for 
old rubbish a month after the last Lord Mayoralty ? There 
would be no need for such a place as Gibbet Street, if there 
were no thieves to dwell in it ; but so long as you go hammer- 
ing parchment act-of-parliament-drums, and beating up for 
recruits for Satan's Light-fingered Brigade, so long will the 
Gibbet Street barracks be open, and the Gibbet Street billet- 
ing system flourish. 

Near a shabby market, full of damaged vegetable stuff, 
hedged in by gin-shops — a narrow, slimy, ill -paved, ill-smell- 
ing, worse-looking street, the majority of the houses private ( ! ) 
but with a sprinkling of marine-stores, rag-shops, chandlers' 
and fried-fish warehouses, low-browed, doorless doorways 
leading to black rotten staircases, or to tainted backyards, 
where corruption sits on the water-butt, and fever lives like 
a house-dog in the dust-bin : with shattered windows, the 
majority of them open with a sort of desperate resolve on the 
part of the wretched inmates to clutch at least some wander- 
. ing fragment of pure light and air : this is Gibbet Street. 
WTio said (and said wisely, and beautifully too), that a sun- 
beam passes through pollution unpolluted? It cannot be 
true, here, in this abandoned place. If a sunbeam could 
permeate into the den, I verily believe it would be tarnished 
and would smell foully before it had searched into the abyss 
of all this vapour of decay. What manner of men save 
thieves, and what manner of women save drudges, bond- 
servants, yet loving help-mates to their brutal mates, live 
here? It would be wholesome and profitable for those 

* Eeformatories, thank God ! have multiplied in the land since these 
lines were first penned. 



412 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

young ladies and gentlemen who imagine even the modern 
thief to be a rake, bejewelled, broad-elothed, with his 
brougham, his park hack and his seraglio, to come and dwell 
here in Gibbet Street. Ask the police (when they are as- 
sured they have a sensible man to deal with, they tell him 
the plain truth), ask astute Superintendent X., practical 
Inspector Z., where the swell mob is to be found. They will 
laugh at you, and tell you that there is no swell mob now. 
Well-dressed thieves there are, of course • robbers on a great 
scale ; well-educated men of the world ; cautious ; who live 
by themselves, or in twos or threes, and in luxury. But the 
thief, genericaily speaking, is an ignorant, coarse, brutalised, 
simple-minded, spendthrift, in spite of his thievish cunning. 
He is always hiding his head in the sand, like the imbecile 
ostrich ; coming back to hide where there is no concealment, 
in Gibbet Street after a great robbery, and pounced upon 
immediately by X., the astute, or Z., the practical. The thief 
is recklessly improvident. His net earnings, like the receipts 
of an usurer-ridden prodigal, are inflnitesimally small in 
proportion to his gross plunder. The thieves' and leaving 
shops are his bill-discounters. He gorges tripe, and clods, 
and stickings. He is drunk with laudanumed beer and 
turpentined gin. He pays five hundred per cent, excess for 
his lodging, his raiment, and his food. He is robbed by his 
comrades ; for there is not always honour among thieves. 
He is as often obliged to thieve for his daily bread, as for 
the means of indulging his profligacy. There is no work 
so hard as thieving. Hours of patient watching, waiting, 
marching, countermarching, flight, skulking, exposure, and 
fatigue have to be passed, for often a reward of three-half- 
pence. The thief's nerves are always strung to the highest 
degree of tension ; he has no holidays ; he is always running 
away from somebody ; always seeking or being sought. The 
thief is as a man afflicted with a mortal disease. Like a 
person with disease of the heart, who knows that some day 
he will stagger and fall, the thief knows he has the great 
convict aneurism ; that the apoplexy of arrest must come 
upon him. He knows not when. He gets drunk sometimes 
and forgets the skeleton ; but he knows it must come some 
day — a skeleton with a glazed hat, a number and letter on 
his collar, and handcuffs in his pocket. 

You need no further picture of Gibbet Street. Walk 
twenty yards and you can see the place itself — the stones, 



GIBBET STBEET. 313 

the gutters, the rags that hang out like banners ; and the 
wretched, pale-faced population : some men's faces swollen 
by liquor, and some women's from bruises, and some women's 
and men's from both. It is safe enough to go down Gibbet 
Street in the day-time — at least yon are safe enough from 
personal violence. If you are well-dressed, of course you 
will be robbed ; but, at night, you had better avoid it. though 
policemen patrol it, and the carriages of the nobility and 
gentry, who are patronising the theatres, are sometimes 
stationary at its upper entrance. 

I have been acquainted with this Tartarus these dozen 
years ; and, although I am a professional town traveller, and 
have frequented, of malice prepense, the lowest haunts of half a 
dozen European capitals, I never bestowed much notice upon 
Gibbet Street. I took it for granted as an abode of thieves. 
glanced curiously at its low-browed, bull-necked, thick-lipped 
inhabitants, and buttoned up my coat pockets when I was 
obliged to pass through it. Lately, however, it so happened, 
that Gibbet Street and I have been nearer acquaintances : and, 
curiously, my more intimate knowledge of this home of dis- 
honesty has been due to the fine arts. 

^sly friend Poundbrnsh — that celebrated but unassuming 
artist — paints Grecian temples. Egyptian pyramids, Oriental 
kiosks, panoramas of the Mediterranean, and bombardments 
of the 31 alakhoff tower — occupying many thousand leagues of 
landscape and square feet of canvas — at a great atelier or 
painting-room, spaciously erected for the purpose, in the very 
thick of Gibbet Street. How Messrs. Doubletie and Coverflats, 
the accomplished directors of this great scene-painting under- 
taking, could have selected Gibbet Street as a location for 
their studio seems, at the first blush, to pass comprehension ; 
but the rent may have been moderate, or the premises conve- 
nient, or the situation central : at any rate there they are 
with thieves to right of them, thieves to left of them, thieves 
in front of them; volleying oaths and ribaldry all day long. 

"Under Poundbruslv's auspices I have had many opportu- 
nities lately of assisting at the At Homes of the Gibbet Street 
thieves. Their interiors are not by any means difficult of 
visual access: for their windows are, as I have said, mostly 
open. Besides a great portion of their daily business is 
transacted in the open street. They eat in the street, they 
drink, fight, smoke, sing, and — when they have a chance — 
thieve in the street. A very curious contemplation is pre- 



314 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

sented by standing at the window of this studio. Turning 
your back to the busy painters, who are pursuing a beautiful, 
humanising art, revelling in fruits and flowers, sunny land- 
scapes, and stately architecture, and then to turn your eyes 
upon this human dunghill. What have we done to be 
brought to this strait ? Look into the black holes of rooms, 
cast your eyes upon those ragged heaps where the creatures 
sleep, hear the men curse, and see them strike the wretched, 
wretched women. 

It was in some of these latter-day contemplations of the 
thieves in their domesticity in Gibbet Street, that I came to 
my grand (!) conclusion that the thief is a man — and that he 
must eat and drink and sleep ; and I am gratified to be able to 
chronicle one little trait of human nature in my human thief, 
and that, too, of the kindlier sort. At one o'clock, post mere- 
diem, lately, the waiter from some adjacent cookshop was 
journeying through Gibbet Street (always a North-west pas- 
sage of great peril and travail to waiters and potboys), and, in 
his hands, he bore one of those stately pyramids of pewter- 
covered dishes of meat and potatoes, which none but waiters 
can balance, or cookshop keepers send out all hot. A thief 
passing that way — a young thief, probably inexperienced, 
new to Gibbet Street, who had not yet acquired its code of 
etiquette — followed the waiter dexterously, and was about to 
tilt the topmost dish from off the pyramid, with a view to 
upsetting the whole edifice, scattering the viands, and 
making off with the contents. I trembled for the result. 
Two or three half-naked boys and a hungry dog of most 
dishonest appearance, watched the proceedings with anxious 
ej^es. The nefarious purpose had nearly been accomplished, 
when there issued suddenly from a doorway, a tall robber — 
a black-whiskered Goliath. He, espying the intention of the 
juvenescent footpad, suddenly cast him into the kennel ; thus 
allowing the waiter with his savoury cargo to pass safely by : 
and roughly shaking the youth, cried out, ' What are you 
up to ? Don't yer know, yer fool ! Them's for Painting 
Eoom!' 

What was this ? W 7 as it reverence for art, or can there be 
really some honour among thieves, some hidden good in this 
wretched Gibbet Street ? 



( 315 ) 



XXVIII. 

STROLLERS AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY. 

The strollers. Have not the righteous powers of law, reform, 
science, and sectarianism been directed for centuries against 
the strollers ? There have been wise Justices in ruffs, and 
doublets, and trunk-hose, determined to put the strollers 
down, and most signally failing in so doing, ever since the 
time of the Spanish Armada ; just as, I dare say, in the mythic 
time of San Apollo and all the gods and goddesses, the great 
Justice Midas — for all that he was squire, knight of the shire. 
and exist os rotulorunn — failed in putting the strollers of his 
epoch clown. Strollers have been declared rogues and vaga- 
bonds by all sorts of statutes : pulpit thunder and quarter- 
sessions lightning have been levelled against them times out 
of number. Xo matter ; the strollers have a principle of life 
in them stronger than the whole family of Shallows. Hunted 
from populous neighbourhoods, and threatened with all those 
legal perils which attend the dire English crime of being 
unlicensed, they are surely to be found, after apparently 
irretrievable extinguishment, cosily ensconced in some quiet 
little village, the marvel and delight of the unsophisticated, 
as they have been for ages. 

Here they are, this blessed spring-tide afternoon, in my 
dear Dumbledowndeary. Their wheels have been new tired, 
some fresh stitches have been put into the bxiskin, an addi- 
tional inch has been added to the cothurnus, and some extra 
dabs have been given to the scenery ; but here in its entirety 
is the Thespian waggon at Dumbledowndeary. 

Which Dumbledowndeary, I beg to remark, is thoroughly 
an out-of-the way place. One of our magnates expresses his 
opinion that it is left out — at all events, you can't find it in 
—many maps of England, and it never rains or snows at the 
same time it does in other places. There is no mint 
(I mean the herb, not the Hotel de la Monnaie) in Dum- 
bledowndeary, no turnip-radishes, no salid-oil, and there 
are very few carrots. There is no lawyer ; there was one some 



316 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

time ago, but lie made a most signal failure of it, and died. 
There is very little clergyman ; for the incumbent couldn't 
make the place out, so he spends his living of six hundred a 
year in Hastings, and the cure of souls is done in job-work by 
a succession of clerical nonentities, of whom very little indeed 
is seen, between service. There is never any cholera at 
Dumbledowndeary, and seldom any fever, and so little sick- 
ness and few accidents, that our doctor's principal amputations 
are confined to the plants in his greenhouse, and he is fain to 
eke out his time by taking photographic portraits, for pure 
love of science, of the inhabitants, to their immense delight : 
mute inglorious Miltons coming out under the process and on 
the prepared paper, as speaking likenesses, and ' Crom wells, 
guiltless of their country's blood,' all generally mild men 
with sandy whiskers, appearing beneath the influence of 
collodion and iodine, as the most truculent and black-bearded 
bravos. We have no crime, and no immorality (to speak of), 
and our only regret is, that more Londoners do not arrive at 
our natty railway station; wander in our green lanes and 
voiceful woods, fill their eyes with the delicious prospect of 
wood and water and meadow around them ; taste our pub- 
licans' neat wines, and avail themselves of their commodious 
stabling, and at last be so delighted with the place as to buy, 
build, or hire houses, and settle in Dumbledowndeary alto- 
gether. But I am afraid that those who know of and love this 
queer, pleasant, little spot, keep the secret to themselves, as 
those Indians do who are aware of the city of gold in Central 
America, and tell no stranger, lest the profane vulgar should 
step in and spoil it. 

Our taste for the drama in Dumbledowndeary, though not 
often indulged in, is vast. We take trips to town sometimes, 
and go to the play ; and mighty are the discussions that after- 
wards take place about the plays we have seen. We have 
settlers amongst us, hermits long since retired from the busy 
world, who can remember Siddons, the elder Kean, and Young. 
These ' shoulder their crutch and show how ' — plays were 
acted. There was a dark man who lodged up the back lane 
last year, and was supposed to have been formerly a play- 
actor. It was mooted that he should read Shakspeare in the 
schoolroom ; and he said he would think about it ; which I 
suppose he has been doing ever since, for no more came of the 
proposition. We have frequent bets of fours and sixes of 
alcoholic fluids, respecting the exact readings of quotations 



STEOLLEES AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY. 317 

from the dramatists : and reference being made to the authors' 
works themselves, both parties are generally found to be in 
the wrong. Lastly, though we have no regular theatre (not 
even the smallest provincial one, within ten miles), we are 
visited, with tolerable regularity, once a year, by a band of 
those wandering histrionics called strollers. They omitted to 
visit us last year, and I grieved; thinking the dramatic 
element in Dumbledowndeary was on the decline ; but a few 
days since, walking up street, the time being dinner time, and 
the object of my journey the fruitless one of procuring a 
ha'porth of mint, with a view to its conversion into sauce for 
lamb, I was greeted with the intelligence that the mummers 
were come. 

The announcement was the more pleasant as it followed 
close on the heels of another class of amusements with which 
we have lately been favoured. We have seen a sight in 
Dumbledowndeary within the last fortnight not unfamiliar. 
I dare say, to my older and travelled readers, but which to 
the younger portion must be quite novel and surprising. 
What do you think of five wild and picturesque foreigners 
appearing in Dumbledowndeary, coming from no man knows 
where, and going no man knew whither ; four of them lead- 
ing two monstrous bears and two hideous wolves, with chains 
and muzzles, and the fifth man bearing a drum of uncouth 
make, which he smote continuously ! Bears and wolves in 
England ! They took us back to the time of King Egbert, 
and the Eoyal Bear, which lived in the Tower, and washed 
himself in the Eiver Thames. The bears were brown beasts, 
with that pitiably half-human appearance, which bears have 
when on their hind-legs, of being distressed mariners in 
shaggy brown coats and trousers, much too loose for them : 
the name of one of them was Martin, and a most woe-begone 
Martin he was, with paws like very dirty driving-gloves, 
with the fingers coming through, a preposterous muzzle, and 
a general expression of the most infinite raggedness and 
wretchedness. He danced, did Martin, and went through the 
military exercise, and kissed his keeper at the word of com- 
mand, with oh ! such an unmistakable longing in his coun- 
tenance to amplify the kiss into a hug, and a gnash, and a 
tear ! Martin's brother was a young bear — Martin the found- 
ling, perhaps — who, whether the major part of his sorrows 
were yet to come, according to the axiom, or not, seemed to 
have quite enough, of them now, and abandoned himself to 



318 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

despair in the dust, at every convenient opportunity, till 
forced to assume the duopedal attitude by the. cudgel of his 
master. As to the two wolves, they were not performing 
wolves, nor dancing wolves, nor learned wolves, by any 
means : they were simply wolves — lanky, brindled, savage- 
looking creatures, whose existence was embittered by an 
insufficiency of raw flesh, human or otherwise, and by the 
necessity of wearing a muzzle, and being tugged about by a 
chain. They viewed the performances of their ursine brethren 
with profound disgust and contempt: their masters, whom 
they unwillingly permitted to drag them along, with more 
disgust still, mingled with fear and loathing. Man delighted 
them not, nay, nor woman either; the one sole object on 
which their attention seemed fixed, and to which their desires 
were directed, lay in the amalgamated legs of the juvenile 
population of Dumbledowndeary. For those tender, fleshy, 
tearable, crunchable, howlable-for extremities did their fierce 
mouths water, their teeth gnash, and their eyeballs glare, 
ana their bushy tails disport themselves, in a manner horrid 
to behold. 

If the bears and the wolves, and their strange keepers (the 
man with the drum was a study in himself) were a source of 
amusement, imagine what a fertile source of recreation the 
strollers must have been. As soon as I heard that the mum- 
mers were come, I lost no time in repairing to the spot 
where they had set up their theatre. It was not ill-chosen. 
A green patch of land, with a natural amphitheatre of turf 
around it, then a path, then another patch, whereon Mr. 
Clewline, the sail-maker, spreads out his sails like gigantic 
table-cloths, and pitches them, or waterproofs them, or does 
something to them with a mysterious compound ; and then 
the broad shining river with the yachts dancing on its 
bosom, like trim bits of nautical cabinet-making ; the dusky 
brick-laden barges with heavy sails, that would seem to be 
impregnated with brick-dust too, so dusky red are they; the 
squat Prussian and Swedish barks waiting at the ballast 
wharf; the Gravesend steamer puffing and smoking along the 
channel on the Essex side ; the unobtrusive, yet labouring 
ant-like little tugs, pilot fishes to great sharks and whales of 
Yankee liners, and Green's Indiamen and Australian packet- 
ships, deep in the water with auriferous cargoes. There is 
one-legged Barker in his little boat, his oars as he feathers 
glancing in the wet spray and golden sun like priceless 



STROLLERS AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY. j 319 

gems, though they are but humble lance wood after all. 
There is Mr. Thumb, the pilot, shoving off to board and pilot, 
nolens volens, a homeward-bound ship ; there is a neat little 
skiff pulling in from a yacht with ladies deep in novel reading 
and crochet work ; there, opposite to me, in Essex, are flat 
marsh lands, and flatter meadows, and the white smoke of 
another train on another railway, and thereabouts, they tell 
me, lives the wicked contractor who sold the hay which the 
horses couldn't eat, and which it was very lucky they did not 
eat, under the circumstances of cold lamb connected with the 
forage in question ; and here, at my feet, is the grassy patch 
with the strollers' booth upon it. 

It is a very tumbledown edifice indeed, of old boards and 
canvas, which have evidently done service in countless grassy 
patches, to say nothing of fairs, all over England. There is 
an outer proscenium supported on a platform, about which 
there can be no mistake, for it simply consists of a few 
loose boards placed on the body of a van, which evidently 
serves for the conveyance of the paraphernalia of the company 
through the country. The proscenium itself, as a work of 
art, is abominable ; as a curiosity it is laudable. All styles 
of decoration find representatives on its surface — the intensely 
Pras-Kaphaelite prevailing; for the rules of perspective are 
wholly set aside, and the avidity of the artist for purity and 
brilliancy have caused him to throw aside all except the 
primary colours — red, blue, and yellow. There are two 
lateral doors, which mean nothing, inasmuch as they lead to 
nothing, and don't open, and upon which knockers in the 
Louis Quatorze style are planted in bitter mockery. There 
is a door, left centre, which is of some signification, inasmuch 
as it is the box, pit, and gallery entrance, and pay-place. 
The summit of the proscenium is occupied by those useful 
domestic animals, the lion and unicorn at issue, as usual, 
about the possession of the crown, and more frequently, I am 
afraid, getting more brown bread than white bread or plum 
cake during the progress of their hostilities ; there are a 
quantity of flowers painted, which, if novelty of design and 
strangeness of colour met with their reward, would infallibly 
carry off the gold medal at Chiswick and all other horti- 
cultural shows ; and, finally, there are the names of the 
proprietors of the booth — Messrs. Hayes and Walton — glaring 
in red lead, and yellow ochre, and blue verditer* The ' walk 
up ' process to the booth is apparently effected by an inclined 



320 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

plane, with a few battens nailed across it at irregular intervals 
— an Avernus of which the descent will be, I opine, more 
facile than the ascent. 

There is a side door of ingress, however — the stage door, 1 
presume — to the Theatre Royal Dumbledowndeary. Close by 
it is another van with a hood or tilt — a sort of mixture of the 
Thespian and Rommaney, or Gipsy, very picturesque. There 
is a ladder leading up to this van or waggon. Between its 
shafts there is at this moment, smoking his pipe, an individual 
who, by his smock frock, might be a waggoner ; by his tight- 
fitting trousers, a stableman ; by his squab oilskin hat, a sailor ; 
by his broken nose and scarred complexion, a fighting man ; 
but who, by his wavy black hair (yet bearing the brand of 
the fillet), his shaven jaw, his stage eye, stage lip, stage step, 
is unmistakably a Thespian, a stroller, a mummer, if you will. 
Can this be Hayes ? Walton, perhaps ? No, Walton should 
be short and stout, and, if I mistake not, bald. He can't be 
both, may be one, is perchance neither. As I muse, another 
man who, in his blue frock' coat, has a smack of the butcher, 
crosses him, bearing a pail of water, and enters the stage 
door. He puzzles me horribly ! What can he want a pail of 
water for ? Not for ablution — that would be too absurd ; 
not for drinking — that were absurder still ; perhaps for some 
dramatic purpose, for something in the play. Anon comes 
forth from the booth, a female form, closely draped in a dingy 
shawl that might have been worn as a toga in one of the 
comedies of Meander, it looks so old. I cannot see her face ; 
but, as she climbs into the waggon, I catch a glimpse of a~ 
cotton stocking — pink ? Well, not very pink ; say lavendered 
by dirt ; and a red leather brodequin. 'Tis a dancer ; and, 
as she disappears there protrudes for a second from under the 
tilt, a human face, and that face is white with chalk, red with 
paint, and bald, with a cockscomb, and is as the face of a 
clown, and I get excited. 

So do some eighty or a hundred boys and girls, of various 
sizes and ages, who are standing, like me, on the turf or 
gambolling on the turf amphitheatre, some with the intention, 
as I have, of patronising Hayes and Walton, when their 
theatre opens. Others, oppressed by that ^perpetual want of 
pence that vexeth public children, contenting themselves 
with seeing as much as they can of the outside of the show, 
hopeless of internal admittance. It is very pleasant to see all 
these happy poor children, not ragged, but in the decent, 



STEOLLEES AT DUMBLEDOWNDEAEY. 321 

homely, common clothes that country children wear ; it is 
very good to hear this village murmur as 

' The mingling notes come soften d from below.' 

I cannot hear] 

4 The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung ;' 

swains don't respond or milkmaids sing in these back parts. 
I cannot hear 

- The watchdog's voice that bays the whispering wind ;' 
but I can hear 

4 The playful children just let loose from school,' 
the noisy geese gabbling o'er the pool, the sober herd lowing 
to meet their young, and the loud laugh which speaks (not 
always, dear Goldsmith) the vacant mind. 

Two sober horses feed quietly by the side of the tilted 
chariot, while the rest of the landscape is made up by a mis- 
anthropic donkey, which appears to have given up thistles 
altogether as gross and sensual luxuries, and browses con- 
tentedly on chalk and stunted thistles ; and a big brown dog 
that seems to know everybody, and tumbles everybody, and 
makes a very fierce pretence of barking and biting, belying 
his fierceness all the time by the wagging of his tail and the 
leer on his honest countenance — a landscape of happiness and 
plenty, and quietude and the Queen's peace. 

Of Peace, say I ?* As I watch the strollers' booth, there 
comes across the field of the river a little black steamer, with 
a white funnel, towing a hulkish, outlandish bark, with her 
mainmast all gone to pieces, with an outlandish flag at her 
mizen, and floating proudly above it the English ensign. 
This is a Eussian prize ; and, as though looking through a 
camera, you suddenly drew a red slide between the lens 
and the eye, this field of peace becomes at once a field of 
war. See, transport ISo. 42 is just going down river ; she 
is chock full of heavy guns and munitions of war ; yonder 
little schooner, painted light-blue, a Fruiterer from the 
Azores, laden with peaceful oranges and lemons, has been 
chartered by Government for the conveyance of stores to the 
Black Sea; transport No. 19 is expected down shortly with 
artillery horses, and transport No. 70 with hussars and 

* a.d. 1855. 



322 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

lancers. I begin to remember that, within a few miles of 
my quiet, peaceful, little Dumbledowndeary, are the most 
famous arsenals and dockyards to be found in this mortal 
world— fields of the balls of death — laboratories of destructive 
missiles. But the waters curl and are blue and sparkling, 
and the tides have their ebb and flow, whether their burdens 
be peaceful argosies or armed galleys ; and the river-shores 
remember that they have seen the Danes in the Thames, and 
the Dutch in the Medway, and the mutiny at the ISTore, and 
that they were none the less green and smiling. 

Messrs. Hayes and Walton do not trouble themselves about 
the war, save in so far as it affects the price of tallow candles 
and two-inch rope, or influences the minds of their audiences, 
leading them (H. and W.) to compose and perform pieces of a 
war turn or of a military tendency — all to suit the popular 
appetite for the drama pugnacious. Thus, though the piece 
originally announced for this evening was the Corsican 
Brothers, or the Fatal Eesemblance and the Murdered Twins : 
H. and W., finding Dumbledowndeary to be partially a down- 
to-sea-going place, including among its population coast- 
guardsmen, bargemen, watermen, and fishermen — persons all 
supposed to have a lively interest in the progress of the war 
— changed the drama to the Kussian War and the Gallant 
Turk ; or, Death, the Danube, and the Tartar Bride. 

We have waited a considerable time — so considerable, 
indeed, that Mr. Sprouts the peripatetic fishmonger and pur- 
veyor of sundries in general, has driven his little truck, drawn 
by a placid little ass, to the brink of the amphitheatre, and is 
driving quite a brisk trade in cakes, nuts, apples, oranges, and 
ginger-beer. We almost feel inclined to ask for bills of the 
play. 

By-and-by a little cheer directs my attention from the 
proscenium ; and my spirits are raised to the highest pitch by 
the appearance on the platform of an Individual. He makes 
his appearance, curiously, much in the same manner as I have 
seen Mr. Calcraft make his appearance on a certain dreadful 
stage in front of one of Her Majesty's gaols, where he does 
the second tragedy business — cautiously advancing to the front 
and curiously peering into and scanning the populace. But 
he wears garments far different from the doomster's sables; 
having on a pair of gay boots, which I dare swear have been 
originally ankle-jacks, and are now covered with a coat of red 
paint ; a pair of ample calico trousers, a broad leathern belt 



STROLLEBS AT DID1BLED0WNDEARY. ' 616 

with a large brass buckle (pattern the Miller and his Men — 
size, Grindoff), a velveteen polka jacket with coarse gold lace 
sewn down all the seams, an imitation point-lace collar, and 
such a turban ! a wondrous combination of a wide-awake hat 
with a dirty shawl twisted round it, and streamers of spangled 
gauze and a broken feather — a turban that would make any 
Cheltenham or Leamington spinster die of envy. This in- 
dividual, after a cursory but evidently efficient survey of his 
auditory — having reckoned them all up, and divided the pay- 
ing from the non-paying ones — disappears into the place from 
whence he came ; soon, however, to re-appear with a long 
green drum, whose bruised parchments attest how long and 
often it has suffered the discipline of the stick. This drum 
he discreetly proceeds to sling by a cord to the posts of the 
proscenium, and deliberately performs a solo upon it — a solo 
that has very little beginning and an elastic end — being 
capable of prolongation ad infinitum ; or of being cut sharp 
off when necessity requires. 

To him, presently, a man in private clothes, with a trom- 
bone. Next, a man with a horn, and a troublesome cough, 
which makes of his horn-blowing one continual catarrh. 
Next, a young lady in long black ringlets and long white 
calico ; next, a ditto ditto in red hair braided and short pink 
calico spangled trousers to match, and blue boots ; next a 
diminutive child-woman or woman-child, I scarcely know 
which, who, with her dark eyes and hair and slight figure, 
would be pretty but for a preternaturally large and con- 
cave forehead — a forehead that seems to argue wrong and 
mismanagement somewhere beyond the inevitable malforma- 
tion of nature ; next a magnificent creation full six feet high, 
with flowing black hair (or wig), a plumed hat, an imitation 
point-lace collar, a half modern military, half Elizabethan 
doublet, a fierce sword, trunk hose, buckskin (imitation) 
tights, and a pair of jack -boots — large, high in the thigh, 
acute in the peaks, lustrous with copal varnish or grease — a 
monarch pair of boots — such boots that had you dared dis- 
place them and they had been Bombastes', he would have had 
your life in a twinkling in King Artaxomines' time. These 
boots seem to oppress their wearer with a deep and awful 
sense of the responsibility they involve. They are perchance 
the only pair of jack-boots in the company, and to wear them, 
perhaps, is as precious a favour as it was of old to wear the 
king's robe of honour. This booted man moves with an 

y 2 



324 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

alternate short step and stride. His eyes are bent downward, 
but not in humility — they are looking at his boots. He has 
no eyes, no ears, no thought apparently for anything beyond 
those nether casings. I look at him with fear and loathing, 
mingled with patriotic hatred ; for I seem to recognise in him 
the Emperor of Eussia, and already suspect him of nefarious 
designs connected with the Tartar Bride. 

. Two more personages appear in succession, and make up 
the effective strength of the company. There is an old man 
with feeble legs and a flaxen wig, ill-concealing a stubbly gray 
head of hair. He wears a gray jerkin with hanging sleeves ; 
beneath which there is a suspicion of Dirk Hatteraick's pink 
striped shirt, and hose to match. Besides being the old man 
of the troupe, physically and dramatically, he is one of the 
orchestra likewise, and carries a battered old flageolet, of 
which the music comes out all at wrong holes and produces 
dismal discord. The last histrionic who makes himself mani- 
fest, is a little man, who, by his particularly bandy legs, frill, 
cockscomb and painted face is of the clown, clowny — the clown 
I caught a glimpse of in the waggon ; and who has a habit of 
rubbing his face continually with a blue pocket-handkerchief 
rolled up into a very small ball, which, taking his painted 
face into consideration, is, at the least, inconvenient. The 
company range themselves on the platform, and there is dead 
silence in the amphitheatre. You might hear a piece of 
sweetstuff drop. 

I very soon find that the clown does not belie his appear- 
ance ; for he advances to the front with the man in the won- 
derful turban, and is immediately addressed by him as Mr. 
Merriman and desired to be funny. 

Upon which he at once stands upon his head. Unfor- 
tunately, however, the boards upon which he stands being loose, 
it occurs to one of them to stand upon its head likewise, upon 
the fulcrum and lever principle, and Mr. Merriman is very 
nearly precipitated down the inclined plane, and into the 
midst of his admirers. He as suddenly recovers himself, 
and makes a joke which is none the less happy for not having 
the remotest connection with the event which has just oc- 
curred. 

6 Merriman,' says the turbaned Turk, in a jaunty, off-hand 
manner, * have you ever travelled ?' 

' All over the world,' answers Merriman. 

* Have you been in 'Merrikar ?' 



STROLLERS AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY. 325 

* No, not there ; I said all over the world, mind.' 

* Well, in Afrikar, Europe, 'Stralia ?' 

* No, no, I said the world.' 

c Well, where 'ave you been V 

Mr. Merriman scratches his head as if to refresh his geo- 
graphical reminiscences, and after a pause, answers, 'I've 
been in Dumbledowndeary.' 

This is taken as a great joke, and is roared at accordingly. 

' Merriman,' asks he of the turban again, ' what is non- 
sense ?' 

' W hy,' to him replies the jocoso, ' to eat vinegar with a 
fork 's nonsense. To try to stop the tide with a teaspoon 's 
nonsense. And to try to stop a woman's tongue when she's a 
talking 's nonsense.' 

This is received as even a more exquisite witticism than 
the first, and is greeted with much haw-hawing and clapping 
of hands by the men, and much blushing and giggling by the 
women. The little folks laugh, as it is their happy privilege 
to laugh at everything at which they don't cry. 

Merriman is proceeding to make another joke, when the 
Turk stops him. 

1 You had better, Merriman,' he says, ' hinform the com- 
pany that this hevening we shall have the honour of pfrom- 
ming the Eooshian War and the Gallant Turk ; or, Death, the 
Danube, and the Tartar Bride.' 

Merriman makes the announcement with many deliberate 
mistakes and transpositions of the original text. 

' As the pfrommences will be raather long,' the Turk adds 
by way of rider, ' we will fust 'ave a shut dence on the out- 
side, and the pfrommences will then kmence in the hinteriar. 
Hadmission sixpence to boxes, and thruppence to gallery.' 

The ' shut dence ' then takes place. But as the space is 
extremely limited on which its evolutions are performed, the 
dancers literally walk through the figures. The clown moves 
his legs a great deal, but his body not much, and is exces- 
sively active within a confined space. The old man, whose 
legs move naturally of themselves through feebleness, is para- 
lytically nimble, and the young lady in white calico is as 
energetic as she can be under the circumstances. I look at 
her and the little child-woman with a sort of nervous interest, 
and observe that they cling to each other, and whisper to- 
gether, and make much of one another. I imagine some 
relationship between them, or at least some strong sympathy 



326 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

and bond of love and suffering, often stronger, God knows, 
than ties of blood. As for the Emperor of Kussia, he feels it 
plainly beneath the dignity of his boots to dance', and contents 
himself with an occasional grim bow to his partner. 

There is rather a hitch at the end of the ' shut dence,' and to 
say the truth, . rather a long wait before the ' pfrommences 
kmence in the hinteriar.' Perhaps the manager is waiting for 
the approach of dusk, for it is yet broad daylight; perhaps 
(and the noise of some hidden hammers would seem to bear 
out this view of the question) the arrangements are not yet 
completed. Meanwhile the solo on the drum is repeated, and 
an overture by the whole of the orchestra (any tune or time) 
and then there is another ' shut dence,' performed however 
without the co-operation of the Emperor, who, probably 
disgusted at the levity of the proceedings, disappears alto- 
gether. 

Just then I become sensible of the presence of young 
Harry Bett, who is commonly known as the Young Squire, 
and has made up his mind to drain the cup of delirious excite- 
ment known as Life in Dumbledowndeary to the very dregs. 
Young Harry has a coat with many pockets, and trousers 
fitting him much tighter than his skin, and, if the constant 
perusal of a betting-book made a reading man, would take 
a double first class at any university. He bets freely, 
does young Harry, upon fights, races, hop-harvests, trotting 
mares, cribbage, boating, ratting, cricketing, and general 
events. He has brought with him a gallon of beer, in 
a flat stone bottle, and a quantity of birds'-eye tobacco and 
short pipes. He is quite an enthusiastic admirer of the minor 
drama, though in rather a violent and turbulent phase. 

He startles me at first somewhat by addressing the mighty 
Emperor of Kussia himself by his Christian name, and by 
making derisive inquiries after his state of health. He alarms 
me by gallantly offering beer to the lady in white ; by break- 
ing into the very marrow of Mr. Merriman's witticisms with 
adze-headed jokes of his own, and by pouring forth to me the 
details of an irruption he had made into the dressing-room of 
the company — which was the stage of the theatre, indeed — 
and, according to his account, presented an exactly similar 
appearance to the barn made famous in Hogarth's print. But, 
when I find that his free-and-easiness is appreciated to the 
fullest extent ; that Hayes evidently thinks him a bold fellow, 
and Walton a dashing spirit, I begin to think that I have 



STROLLERS AT DOIBLED0T\"XDEARY. 327 

been living behind the time somehow, and that life in Dum- 
bledowndeary is the life for a rackety blade, after all. 

Londer beats the drum, and louder still brays the mttsic 
through the inspiriting strains of ' Pop goes the Weasel, 3 which 
dashing melody young Harry has called for. and is now sup- 
posed to be heard for the first time in Duinbledowndeary. 
Hey for dissipation ! Let us throw aside the conventionalities 
of society and be gay and rackety with a vengeance. We 
spurn the inclined plane, with its servile battens nailed 
across, and enter the Theatre Eoyal by the side-door, when 
we immediately assume nine points of the law — possession of 
a front seat — supposed to form part of the boxes ; young 
Harry sternly tendering the gallery price, threepence, which 
after some demur is accepted by the Tartar Bride, who 
appears to be Argus-eyed : for though taking money at the 
gallery door outside, she spies us in the boxes, and is literally 
down upon us in a twinkling. 

During an interval of from ten to fifteen minutes, some 
twenty score of our population come tumbling into the 
theatre. There is nothing but a coarse canvas coveriug, 
supported on poles, overhead, rough deal planks on tressels 
to sit upon, and the bare grass beneath. The theatre is — well,. 
not brilliantly, but — lighted with somebody's patent gas, 
which appears to be a remarkably pitchy compound, flaring 
away in tin cressets. We make ourselves very comfortable, 
however, with the gallon of beer (which young Harry 
liberally dispenses to his neighbours), and the tobacco-pipes, 
while above us rise tiers of seats occupied by brick-makers, 
ballast-heavers, sand-men. farm-labourers, nursery-maids, 
decent young women (and in that respect my Dumbledown- 
deary is a very coronal of jewels of pure water), bargemen, 
boatmen, preventive men. children, and dogs. You would be 
puzzled to find a more motley assemblage at any other theatre 
in England, major or minor. The aristocracy of the place, 
such as the butcher, the farmers, and two or three worthy 
landlords, do not hold aloof from the entertainment altogether, 
but they are bashful, and will drop in by-and-by. 

All in, and ail ready to begin— in front, at least — though 
by a continued hammering behind all does not seem quite 
ready there. I see Mr. Merriman and the Turk in anxious 
confabulation over an old hat ; which, from its tinkling when 
moved, I conjecture must contain coppers. Those coppers 
must be the receipts, and Merriman and the Moslem must be 



328 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Hayes and Walton. The convex-headed young lady (who is 
otherwise attired as a coryphee), laboriously brings down the 
much- en during drum ; and, placing it before that part of the 
proscenium where the orchestra should be but is not, grasps 
the sticks in her tiny little hands and begins battering away 
at it afresh. I begin to grow very sick of this very long wait, 
likewise of the continuous strophes of ' Pop goes the Weasel/ 
which the brass band drones forth; though I am somewhat 
diverted by the touching resignation with which the flageolet 
allows the trombone to wipe the mouthpiece of his instrument 
on his sleeve, and also by a survey of the coat and hat of the 
trombone himself. That musician is one diamond of grease, 
and his clothes form perfect facets of oleaginous matter. 
Young Harry, however, does not find the time hang heavily. 
He hands the foaming can about — at least its substitute, a 
broken mug — he converses familiarly with the ladies of the 
company who sit familiarly on the front benches till it be their 
turn to ascend the stage, and he holds earnest parley with some 
members of the upper gallery who are beguiling the time by 
pelting us with nut-shells, and broken pipes. Two or three 
* hallos !' and 'now thens !' accompanied by a strong recom- 
mendation to ' cheese it ' (i. e., act of cessation), cause these 
trifling annoyances to cease. Meanwhile, the theatre is getting 
fuller. I need not say that the free-list is entirely suspended 
— no ! not entirely : there is one exception — the policeman is 
admitted free. He surveys the assemblage municipally, the 
proscenium critically, the corps dramatique favourably. The 
performances have not long commenced before I observe him 
applauding the Emperor of Kussia enthusiastically. 

With that potentate, who is sitting majestic in his boots 
immediately before me, and condescendingly partaking of beer 
with the young Squire, I enter into brief conference. I am 
somewhat disappointed to find that he is merely a Russian 
field-marshal after all, but I still revere his boots. He tells 
me that I was right in my surmise respecting Hayes and 
Walton. They are the parties, he says, and very nice parties 
they are. He apologises for the thinness of the company, 
saying that it is not yet complete, but that it was very strong 
at Stepney Fair, where they were doing twenty houses a day. 
The lady in white is Mrs. Hayes. He thinks Dumbledown- 
deary a poor place. He anticipates but mediocre business, as 
the thing isn't known yet, and they havn't as much as sent a 



STROLLERS AT DUMBLEDOWNDEARY. 329 

drum about. Do I think that the tradesmen would give a 
bespeak? If so, they would have some bills printed, and — 

Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle ! A bell, which has been ringing 
about once in every half minute as a species of sop to the 
public impatience, now rings to some purpose, and the cur- 
tain rises. 

The Eussian War ! The Tartar Bride ! Death and the 
Danube ! The Gallant Turk ! Yes ; let me see. Azarack 
(this Turk) is in love with Selima, pronounced Syllabub (lady 
in white), daughter to Chum-Chum, a Tartar peasant (the old 
man, and discovered to be a rank Irishman) , but is coveted 
by a Eussian Field-Marshal (Boots). There is an under-plot, 
treating of the loves of Hilda Chum-Chum's second daughter 
(Convex) and Wingo, a Wallachian peasant (played by a per- 
sonage in a costume novel to me, but, if I mistake not, Mr. 
Merriman in buff boots). The drama is in three acts, aver- 
aging twelve minutes each. The scene varies between a 
woodman's hut, a modern drawing-room, and a dungeon, sup- 
posed to be the palace or castle of Field-Marshal Boots. I 
think I cannot better sum up the plot than by stating that in 
act the first there is one murder, two fights, Wingo up the 
chimney (which catches fire), one imprisonment of Chum- 
Chum, and three appeals (on her knees) by Selima to Boots, 
beginning with ' Ear me.' Act the second : three fights, two 
abductions of Selima, one elopement by Hilda, a torture un- 
dergone by Chum-Chum, a comic song by Wingo, and innu- 
merable soliloquies by Boots. Act the third : three fights 
(one fatal), one ghost, one general reconciliation, and a dance 
by the characters, ending with the Triumph of the Turks, and 
Euin of the Eussians. I need not say that Boots is at last 
totally discomfited and brought to signal shame, and is drag- 
ged off, dead, by the toes of those very jack-boots he has done 
so much, by his ruffianly conduct, to disgrace. I may add 
that all these events appear to take place in that part of 
Turkey which borders on Tartary, close to the Danube, where 
it falls into the Baltic Sea ; that the dialogue is all carried on 
in the purest vernacular, including such words as ' old Bloke/ 
' blow me,' ' pickles,' ' go to Bermondsey,' and the like ; that 
it is elevated, however, by sundry scraps from 'Othello,' ' Man- 
fred,' ' Venice Preserved,' and ' Eichard the Third/ sprinkled 
hither and thither like plums in a pudding, and spouted by 
Boots ; and, to wind up, that there is not one single H in a 
right place among the whole company. 



330 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

I must confess that, in my vagabond way, I find it all very 
pleasant notwithstanding; and that I am charmed with the 
audience, so charmed with the play, acted out upon the fresh 
green turf. So I sit through the laughable drama, of ' A Day 
Well Spent ' (not to speak of a variety of intermediate singing 
and dancing) with great content, and, at parting, promise the 
ex-Emperor (in private life at once a humble and familiar 
man) that I will interest myself with the tradesmen for a 
bespeak next Monday. 



XXIX. 

CHEERILY, CHEERILY ! 



If I had not been in London within the last month, and seen 
the wondrous tide of emigration setting out from the docks 
there ; if I had not read in certain journals of the Jeremy 
Diddler and its teeming cargo ; if I had not passed through the 
port of Southampton lately, and gazed upon the Hampshire 
folk singing loud emigratory poeans, and departing by whole 
tribes for the Diggings, with cradle, mattock, and spade ; if 
many weeks had passed since at Havre I saw the Grand Bassin 
crammed — choked, with Yankee liners, with emigrant-ships 
for the States, for California, and for Australia (some of 
which, I make bold to tell you, in confidence, were in my 
private opinion no better than tubs) ; if I did not know that 
Plymouth, and Bristol, and Cork, yea, and the American 
seaboard far away (wheels within wheels) had each their 
exodus ; that in remote South Sea islands and Pacific inlets, 
painted savages were packing up their wardrobes, consisting, 
I suppose, of a tomahawk and a toothpick, neatly folded in a 
plantain-leaf; if I did not know that in swarming Canton 
and thieving Shanghae, and piratical little mud-and-thatch 
villages on the Yo-hang-ho and Yang-tse-Kiang, broad-hatted 
and long-tailed Chinamen were saving up pice and cash for 
passage-money and gold-digging tools ; if I did not know 
that, from Indus to the Pole, blacks, whites, tawnies, and 
mulattos, were baking human heads, and polishing skulls, 
and carving concentric balls, and weaving gorgeous shawls, 
and curing reindeers' tongues, and fermenting Champagne 
wine for the Australian market ; that, wherever there were 
hearts to feel and tongues to express the fierce, raging lust for 



CHEERILY, 

gold, the cry was, £ Off, off, and away !' — if I did not know 
this, I say, I should be tempted to think that from Liverpool 
alone the great army of voluntary exiles was setting forth ; 
that there, and there alone, was the Eed Sea and the host of 
Israel, with their gold, and silver, and precious stones ; there, 
the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud ; there, the prospect 
of wandering in a watery desert not forty, but one hundred 
days : for, verily, all Liverpool seems to be off. 

1 A king stood on the rocky brow 
That looks o'er seaborn Salamis . . . ' 

But I, poor, penniless plebeian, with never a regal bend in 
my scutcheon, stand on the stones of mud-born Liverpool ; 
every stone of whose docks, and every brick of whose ware- 
houses was wont to be cemented, according to Mr. George 
Frederick Cooke, ' by the blood and sweat of the enslaved 
and murdered African ;' and from the brows of Prince's Dock, 
and Canning Dock, and Bramley Moore Dock — from the brows 
of that unequalled line of basins, reaching from the shore 
opposite Eastham to below Bootle and Waterloo — I gaze on 
the ; ships by thousands,' and the ' men in nations,' that lie 
below. 

Oh, cheerily, cheerily ! is the anchor-song, morning, noon, 
and night in the great docks where the vessels from the coast 
of Africa lie, which have come home laden with gold-dust, 
and palm-oil, and elephants' teeth, and which are off again, 
ere many days, with huge packages of Birmingham hardware 
and Manchester goods, coral necklaces, and gimcrack orna- 
ments for Mumbo Jumbo and Ashantee fetishes, slop rifles 
and cutlasses for the King of Dahomey's amazons. Bright 
blue or bright green, with brave streaks of white, are these 
vessels painted — hulls, masts, and yards ; whether that the 
rays of the African sun fall less fiercely on them than on a 
black surface, or whether to dazzle and bewilder the simple 
savages with harlequin colours, deponent sayeth not. A 
strong, a very strong odour of palm-oil scents the breeze, 
pervades the decks, breaks out in a rich oleaginous dew on 
the apparel and faces of the bystanders. Here is a gruff mate, 
seated on a water-cask, teaching a parrot to swear, who is all 
oil — clogged and sticky with the luscious product. Talk of 
the Hull whalers ! what are those train-oil-indued vessels to 
these greasy ships and greasier men? Gigantic tubs and 
casks of palm-oil, worth, they tell me, from thirty to forty 



332 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

pounds each, are being hoisted on shore, rolled about the 
quays, gauged by the vicious-looking boring-tools of the 
Custom-house officers, and carted away in greasy vans. 

Empty casks there are also, and in plenty, which are to be 
conveyed back to Africa ; then brought home full of oil again. 
How many voyages have these ill-coopered tubs made since 
they were hammered up by swarthy, black Kroomen, in some 
sweltering barracoon on the Guinea coast? What raging 
suns, what blustering hurricanes, what soaking deluges of 
rain, what legions of winged locusts and mosquitoes, must 
have shone, and blown, and battered against those crazy old 
staves, since they first held palm-oil ! Coopered, too, by 
slaves ; worked at to the music of cowhide-whips, or paid for 
in drams of rum, or lacquered buttons and scraps of red cloth. 
And yet, consoling thought ! how many thousand pounds of 
candles and bars of soap have been made from the yellow 
grease these casks have held, and how little we reck, seeing 
them kicking about on this Liverpool quay, of what the 
Kroomen's cooperage and the greasy sap of the African tree 
have done for civilization and for Christianity. As I muse, 
come a flying horde of ragged wretches to scrape with oyster- 
shells and long nails what portions of coagulated oil yet adhere 
to the insides of the casks. But a stem dock policeman falls 
upon them and smites them. 

If you think to cross that bridge leading from one dock to 
the other, my friend in the bombazine dress, the black 
triangular bonnet, and the big, flat, chequered basket like 
a wicker draught-board, you will be disappointed, as I have 
been. For while I was lingering on the Palm-Oil Quay, 
underground machinery was at work, strange noises were 
heard, some cog-wheels moved, and the bridge, gravely part- 
ing in the middle, disappeared into the dock walls, like a 
trick in a pantomime. A bold baker made a flying leap on 
one half, just as the water-parted operation took place ; and 
he gained the opposite side, somehow, but how I know not, 
and now stands there exulting, though confessing that it was 
a ' close shave.' A dreary gulf flows between him and me ; 
but a big ship is coming out of dock, they tell me, and I 
must make the best of it, and wait till she has passed, and 
the bridge is drawn to again. 

A disappointment ! No big ship is here, but a little leg- 
of-mutton-sailed, squat, grubby barge, full of — mercy on us !— • 
chairs and tables. The * Saucy Sally ' of Lancaster, Flachey, 



CHEERILY, CHEERILY! 333 

master. There are chests of drawers for'ard, and four-post 
bedsteads aft ; and the captain (five feet of tarpaulin, with a 
yellow oilskin hat, in the midst of which his brown face 
glows like a gigantic blister) commands his crew from a 
Pembroke table. The ' Saucy Sally ' is not too proud to remove 
goods in town and country, and to enact the part of a spring 
van on the salt seas. Some Hegira from Liverpool to Lan- 
caster is she favouring now, though I cannot, in connection 
with the railway and this Pickford and Chaplin and Home 
era, discover the advantage of the long sea for so short a 
period of transit. I am reminded of that dear but old- 
fashioned friend of mine who, to this day, insists on coming 
from Margate by the hoy! A hoy from Margate in 1859; 
shade of Charles Lamb ! 

The ' Saucy Sally ' has dropped down into the river, the 
captain bearing, with phlegmatic composure, some jocose criti- 
cisms on his singular cargo. But now, following her, comes 
the big ship in good earnest — the ' Zephaniah, W. Caucus,' of 
New York, fifteen hundred tons, bound for Port Phillip. It 
may appear strange to you that an American vessel should 
carry British emigrants to a British colony, but stranger still 
will it seem, when I inform you (as I am informed by a 
politician with # an umbrella and a shockingly bad tongue in 
the way of statistics, behind me) that British vessels can in 
no wise attempt the carrying trade in the American seaports, 
and would convey emigrants from New York to San Francisco 
at their peril. At which the statistical umbrella-carrier gets 
quite purple and inflamed with indignation against free-trade 
without reciprocity ; so much so, that I move out of the way, 
being of the free-trade way of thinking. 

The 4 Zephaniah, W. Caucus,' was a large cotton-ship once ; 
but, no sooner did the exodus to Australia commence than she 
became suddenly, and without any prior training, one of the 
Blue Peter line of packet-ships, which, as the whole world 
knows, are all A. l's at Lhyyd's, are all copper-bottomed and 
copper-fastened, all carry experienced surgeons, and all offer 
peculiar and unrivalled accommodation for cabin and steerage 
passengers. The three-quarter statuette of Z. W. Caucus — 
probably a great transatlantic shipowner, or lawgiver, or 
speculator in town lots, or orator, or wild-beast tamer, or 
something famous — stands proudly, in wood and whitewash, 
at the head of the ship, surveying the hawse-holes with the 
eye of a monarch, and defying the bowsprit as he would an 



334 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

enemy. Looking at him I am fain to confess the very great 
family likeness between figure-heads generally. They all 
seem to have been chiselled from the same models, designed 
in the same train of thought. Caucus, now, with the addition 
of a cocked hat and epaulettes, and minus an eye or an arm, 
would be twin-brother to Admiral Nelson, bound to Singapore, 
close by ; with a complete coat of gold-leaf, a fiercely-curled 
wig and a spiky crown, he would do excellently well for 
' King Odin,' screw-steamer for Odessa ; with an extra leer 
notched into his face, his whiskers shaved off, and in his 
hand a cornucopia resembling a horse's nosebag, twisted and 
filled with turnips, he would pass muster for Peace or Plenty ; 
while with a black face, a golden crown and bust, and a 
trebly-gilt kitchen-poker or sceptre, he would be the very 
spit and fetch of Queen Cleopatra. Distressingly alike are 
they, these figure-heads, with the same perpetual unmeaning 
grin in their wooden faces, the same eyes, coats, hair, and 
noses in salient angles ; the same presumptuous attitudes, as 
though the forecastle (save the mark !) were not good enough 
for them, and carrying, all, the same pervading expression of 
impertinent inanity — so much so, that I could almost find it 
in my heart to strike them. Among other departments of 
the Fine Arts as applied to practical uses, figure-heads stand 
specially in need of reformation; and some day or other, 
when Sir Edwin Landseer has taken that zoological abomina- 
tion, the Koyal Arms, in hand ; when Mr. Grant or Mr. 
Thorburn have turned their attention towards the pictorial 
amelioration of the Marquisses of Granby and Heroes of 
Waterloo in the possession of the Licensed Victuallers ; the 
Government will, perhaps, commission Mr. Bailey or Mr. 
Lough to apply the long-neglected principles of ornamental 
statuary to the works of our nautical sculptors ; and, rivalling 
that great benefactor who first reformed our tailors' bills, 
reform our figure-heads. 

But to the Z. W. Caucus. Her accommodation. Well ; I 
grant the copper bottom and copper fastenings, the expe- 
rienced surgeon and the unrivalled cabins, but the steerage, 
the commonalty's cabins — humph ! I look on the deck of 
the big ship, and I see it alive with fevered, dusty, uncom- 
fortable emigration at sixteen pounds a head: — a desert of 
heads, and tossing, struggling legs and arms, with an oasis of - 
poop, where the cabin passengers smile blandly from beneath 
their tegmine fagi, and peer with spy-glasses and lorgnettes at 



CHEERILY, CHEEKILY! 335 

tlie crowded fore-deck, as they would at a curious show- 
Wily don't the steerage folk go down below instead of cum- 
bering the decks? is a question you will very naturally ask, 
and which has been asked, too, several times within the last 
ten minutes by the captain and his mates, with sundry ener- 
getic references connected with comparative anatomy, and the 
invocation of strange deities. T> hy don't they go below ? 
Well, poor creatures ! do you know what the below is they 
have to go to, and to live in, for four months ? Erebus mul- 
tiplied by Xox, divided by Limbo, multiplied again by a 
chaos of trunks, and casks, and narrow berths, and bruised 
elbows — of pots, pans, kettles, and children's heads, that seem 
to fulfil the office of the hempen fenders on board steamboats, 
and to be used to moderate the first sharp collision between 
two hard surfaces — a chaos of slipping, stumbling, swearing, 
groaning, overcrowding, and — no, not fighting. Let us be 
just to the poor people. There is more law, and justice, and 
kindly forbearance, and respect for age and feebleness in the 
steerage of an emigrant ship, than in the Great Hall of Pleas 
all the year round, with the great door wide open and all the 
judges ranged. Men find their level here, in these darksome 
wooden dungeons ; but man's level, gentlemen, is not neces- 
sarify brutality, and violence, and selfishness. I have seen 
kindness with never a shirt, and self-denial in rags ; and 
down in noisome, sweltering steerages there is, I will make 
bold to aver, many a Dorcas ministering barefoot, and many a 
good Samaritan who has but what he stands upright in. 

Smile away, gentlemen passengers on the poop. You have 
but to smile, for your passages are paid, and your prospects 
on arrival in the colony are bright. Smile away, for you 
will have fresh meat during a great portion of the passage, 
and preserved provisions during the remainder. For you are 
those crates of ducks and geese, those festoons of vegetables, 
those hundredweights of beef, and veal, and mutton, packed 
in ice. Smile away, for you have cosy, airy little state- 
rooms, with cheerful holes in the wall for beds, an elegant 
saloon, an obsequious steward, books, flutes, accordions, 
cards, dice, and book-learning. You can, if you have a mind, 
■ write your memoirs or a novel, during the voyage, compose 
! an opera, study navigation, or learn the key- bugle. If you 
must be sea-sick, you can retire to your state-rooms and be ill 
there comfortably and elegantly. But, down in the steerage, 
how are the poor folk to wile away the weary time ? Fancy 



336 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

the honest creatures during the first three days after the 
Z. W. Caucus has sailed. Everybody ill, everybody groaning, 
all the women whimpering, all the children crying. Every- 
thing unpacked, but nothing ' come-at-able.' Heavy trunks, 
chests of drawers, and washhand-stands, breaking away, and be- 
coming bulls of upholstery in ship-board china-shops. Knives 
and forks and plates running wild, and drinking-horns going 
clean out of their mind. ' That'll be it, sir,' says a sailor, 
who has been ' out foreign,' to me ; ' but bless you, when they 
have been well shaken up for two or three days, they'll settle 
down comfortably enough.' Ah ! when they have ' settled 
down/ and are bearing straight away across the great ocean, 
what dreary days and nights they will pass ! How bitterly 
grandfather will regret that he is ' no scollard,' and that he 
didn't 'take to his laming kindly;' and how little boy Ned, 
who has thriven at school, reading from a torn and yellow 
copy of the Weekly Blunderer (more prized there than the 
newest, dampest, third edition of the ' Times ' on London 
breakfast tables), reading to a delighted gaping audience of 
graybeards and matrons, babes and sucklings, will become 
for that and many succeeding days a wonder and a prodigy ! 
Then, on fine Sunday evenings, they will lean quietly over 
the bulwarks, and watch the rapid course of the good ship ; 
or, shading their eyes from the sun's rays, looking wistfully 
ahead, and speculate where land may be, far, far away be- 
yond the waste of blue. There will be gay fellows aboard 
who will sing songs and crack jokes ; there will be story- 
tellers as indefatigable as that prince of barbers who had the 
seven brothers ; but, I am afraid also that there will be many 
score passengers in that narrow steerage who will be in- 
sufferably bored and wearied by the voyage : who will count 
the time from breakfast to dinner, and so to supper, and so to 
bed, wishing the good ship and her passengers, several times 
during the twenty-four hours, at Jericho. 

Still glides the Z. W. Caucus out of dock, somewhat slowly, 
for she is heavily laden, and lies deep in the water. A por- 
tion of her crew are busy at the capstan-bars — sallow, Yankee 
fellows mostly, with elf-locks and red flannel shirts, and tarry 
trousers. As they pace, they spit ; and in the intervals of 
spitting they sing, or rather moan in chorus a dismal ditty, 
that hath neither tune nor words, but which means some- 
thing, I suppose. Anon the strains are wild and fitful, like 
the wailings of an iEolian harp ; anon they rise to a loud and 



CHEERILY, CHEEKILY! 33. 

vengeful crescendo, like a Highland coronach. Not all the 
crew, though, are joining in this mysterious chant ; a very 
considerable portion of them are down below in their berths, 

sleeping off a surfeit of rum and tobacco ; and not a few will 
be brought on board, while the Z. W. Caucus is in the river. 
also affected by rum and tobacco, and affectionately guarded 
by a boarding-master, or proprietor of a sailors' lodging-house 
(whom I should be sorry to say was two-fourths crimp and 
the remainder extortioner;, who has the greatest interest in 
bringing sailors aboard, seeing that he is paid so much a head 
for them in consideration of certain advances he has made, or 
is supposed to have made to them, and which are duly 
deducted from the pay of the unconscious mariner. 

Nearly out of dock, and the commander, Captain Paul W. 
Blatherwick, of Forty-second Street, Xew York, who is stand- 
ing amidships, turns his quid complacently. The captain 
wears a white hat, with a very broad brim, and an obstinate 
and rebellious nap, refusing pertinaciously to be brushed or 
smoothed. He has a shirt of a wonderful and complicated 
pattern, more like a paperhanging than a Christian shirt, and 
with a collar which looms large, like the foresail of a yacht. 
He has a profusion of hair and beard, and very little eyes, and 
a liberal allowance of broad black ribbon and spy-glass. 
Captain Blatherwick is part owner as well as commander, and 
has therefore a paternal interest in his emigrants ; but he is 
rather pre-occupied just now. for two of his very best hands 
— A. B.\s, stalwart, trusty reefers and steerers — are absent ; 
and although he has searched all the low lodging-houses and 
all the low taverns in the town, he has been unable to find 
them. Just, however, as he has made a virtue of necessity. 
and. giving them up for lost, has shaped a fresh plug of 
tobacco for his capacious cheek, there is a stir and bustle in 
the crowd ; its waves heave to and fro, and parting them like 
a strong steamer, come two men. One has his hammock on 
his head, large gold ear-rings, and his ' kit ; in his hand. He 
flies like the nimble stag celebrated in Mr. Handel's Oratorio : 
but he is pursued by a Dalilah, a Circe, an enchantress, with 
a coral necklace, dishevelled hair, and a draggle-tailed dimity 
bedgown. She clings to his kit ; she embraces his hammock ; 
she passionately adjures him to leave her, were it only his 
ear rings, as a souvenir. But he remembers that England 
(represented, for the moment, by his Yankee captain) expects 
every man to do his duty for fifty shillings a month and his 

z 



338 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

victuals ; and , shutting his ears to the voice of the charmer, 
he leaps on board. I say leaps, for there are ten good solid 
feet of muddy water between the quay edge and the side of 
the Z. W. Caucus ; yet you have scarcely time to shudder and 
think he will be drowned, ere he is scrambling among the 
shrouds, as a playful kitten would skip about, if kittens wore 
red shirts and ear-rings. His companion is equally rapid in 
his motions— more so, perhaps, for he is impeded by no 
luggage, and clung to by no Dalilah. He has little wherewith 
to lure Dalilah ; for, of all the notable equipments with which 
he landed at George's Dock, fifteen days ago, he has now 
remaining— what think you? a blanket! As I stand here, 
nothing but a sorry, patched, tattered blanket, — nor shirt, 
nor shoe, nor rag else. He wraps it about him sternly though, 
as though it were a toga ; and, with a hurrah of defiance, a 
yell from the crowd, and a cheer from his shipmates, vaults on 
board. Then he falls down a ladder, very drunk, and I see 
him no more. They will be skinned, they will be fleeced, 
these foolish Jacks. They, won't go to the admirable and 
palatial Sailors' Home. They will go down to Wapping, and 
Paradise Street, and fall among thieves. Who is to help them 
if they won't help themselves ? 

Oh, cheerily, cheerily ! The big ship is fairly out of dock. 
The ropes are cast off, and she stands down the river, towed 
along by a steamer ; the poor emigrants crowding the decks, 
the tops, the yards even, to take their fill of England, home, 
and beauty, seen for the last time. He who knows all things 
knows alone if they, or their children, or their children's 
children, will ever see the beloved land again. 

The bridge will not be down for half an hour yet, for the 
4 King Odin, 5 Czernicheff master, screw-steamer for Odessa, 
is coming out laden with boiler-plates, and to come home again 
with wheat. She needs no ' tug,' but steams out stolidly on 
her own end, and with her own screw. There is another 
Yankee liner at anchor off Egremont, and just on the point of 
sailing. Shall we slip on board this grimy, uncouth, useful 
tug-steamer, and board her for a minute ? 

The ' Elizabeth Scradgers,' eight hundred tons, Captain 
Peleg J. Whittlestick, is a genuine ' liner.' She is bound for 
New York, with forty cabin passengers and two hundred 
steerage ditto. Sixteen guineas are demanded for the after- 
passage, the sum of two pounds ten is the ticket for the 
steerage multitude. And such a multitude! Three-fifths 



CHEERILY, CHEERILY! 339 

Irish, one-fifth Germans, and a timid, irresolute, scared, 
woe-begone fifth of English, who look as if they had gone to 
sleep in Liverpool and had been knocked np in the Tower of 
Babel. A confusion of tongues, a confusion of tubs, a con- 
fusion of boxes. A flux of barbarous words, a tangle of 
children settling on bulkheads and ladder-rounds like locusts. 
And an odour ! ugh ! let us go on deck, whither all the pas- 
sengers follow us ; for the muster-roll is being called, and as 
the authorities verify the name and passage-money receipt of 
each emigrant, the Government Emigration agent ascertains 
that there are no cases of infectious disease among the pas- 
sengers ; no lame, halt, and blind ; no paralytics and no bed- 
ridden dotards. Andy O'Scullabogue of Ballyshandy, County 
Cork, is turned back for having a trifle of five children ill 
with a putrid fever. Judith Murphy can by no means be 
passed, for she is appallingly crippled. Florence M'Shane is 
sent on shore because he is blind, and Terence Rooney, 
because his mother has only one leg. These poor wretches 
have been scrambling and scraping their passage-money 
together for months. The two pounds ten have come, six- 
pence by sixpence — nay, penny by penny, from the peelings 
of diseased potatoes ; from the troughs of gaunt, greyhound- 
like pigs ; down long ladders in hods of mortar, in London or 
in Dublin; out of damaged oranges in Saint Giles's and 
Bethnal Green. They are the economies from relinquished 
gin glasses and eschewed tobacco ; the savings of denied red 
herrings, and half rations of potatoes. Some of the emigrants 
have begged their passage-money ; some are about to emi- 
grate at the expense of the parish, and some have had their 
passage-money remitted to them from their friends in America. 
While the ceremony of ' passing ' has been going on on 
deck, the crew of the vessel have been below, searching for 
stowaways — unfortunate creatures too poor to pay the neces- 
sary sum, who have concealed themselves in out-of-the-way 
holes and corners, thinking to escape detection in the general 
confusion, and to be conveyed across the Atlantic free of 
expense. But they are mistaken. You must get up very 
early in the morning if you would essay to get on the blind 
side of an American sailor; and not many minutes have 
elapsed before two ragged women are discovered in some 
hideous crevice, and a wretched dwarf, clutching a fiddle 
under his shrunken arm, is detected in a cask, his heels 
upwards, and coiled up into a perfect Gordian knot of de- 

z 2 



oiO GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

formity . I do not exaggerate, and I libel no one when I say, 
that after they have been well hustled and bonnetted on the 
deck, these forlorn beings are kicked over the side by the 
chief mate, a gigantic mariner in a tail-coat, raised. in Connec- 
ticut, and with a huge brown fist, so hard, so horny, so corru- 
gated with knotted veins, that it looks like the fist of that 
slave-dealer alluded to by the authoress of ' Unule Tom's 
Cabin ' — as if it ' had grown hard in knocking down niggers.' 
' For,' says the mate, jerking a jet of tobacco juice and an 
explanation to me across his shoulder, ' you must jest ketch 
'em up sharp, you must, these Irishers, and that's a fact. It's 
a word and a blow here, and no flies.' And this latter axiom 
the chief officer religiously carries out in all his dealings with 
the steerage passengers, anathematizing the eyes of any refrac- 
tory emigrant for the first offence, and knocking him down 
like an ox for the second. 

I stumble aft, as well as I can for luggage, human and in- 
animate, and take a peep into the saloon, where there is a 
negro steward in a white jacket, and where there are soft 
carpets, softer couches, gaily-decorated panels, comfortable 
state-rooms, silken hangings, and a regiment of spittoons 
carved and gilt in the Louis Quatorze style, and quite gor- 
geous to behold. A passenger I find below seems so delighted 
with his bed, that he is continually lying down on it, then 
jumping up, falling back half a dozen paces on the bright 
Brussels carpet, and regarding the trim couch with rapt 
ecstasy — rubbing his hands meanwhile with the anticipation 
of quite a surfeit of luxuries for his sixteen guineas. But a 
little bird which has accompanied me whispers that the 
Elizabeth Scradgers will be no sooner out of the river than 
the bright carpets will be rolled up, and the painted panels un- 
screwed, and that the silken hangings, and mahogany fittings, 
and soft couches will disappear, to be replaced by bare boards, 
and scrubby horsehair, and hard beds — the luxuries being re- 
served for the next departure from port. What else the little 
bird would tell me I know not, for at this moment comes Cap- 
tain Peleg J. Whittlestick from his cabin, with loud and nasal 
injunction for all strangers to ' clear !' He is as like in voice, 
person, and dress to the captain of the Z. W. Caucus as two 
cherries are like each other. The Government Emigration 
agent, the surgeon, the broker, the captain's friends, and I 
who write, step on board the tug. ' Cheerily, cheerily, oh!' 
begins that dismal windlass chorus as the anchor is being 



CHEEKILY, CHEERILY! 341 

hove up ; the emigrants give a sickly cheer, and another ship- 
load of humanity is off. 

The mysterious agency which whilom removed the dock 
bridge from beneath my feet, has slowly ground it (with a 
rusty grumble as of iron chains in torture) into its place again, 
and I cross over to the other side. 

Dock upon dock, quays after quays, { quay berths,' loading 
and unloading sheds, long lines of bonding warehouses, barrels, 
bales, boxes, pitch, tar, ropes, preserved provisions, water- 
casks, and exodus everywhere ! Whole tribes of north-country 
people, and west-country people, and all sorts of country 
people, darting off to the Antipodes with an eager, straining 
rush. As for New York, or Boston, or Philadelphia, those 
seaports are only considered as being ' over the way,' easy 
trips across the water, to be accomplished with a carpet-bag 
and a hat-box, and with as little fuss and ceremony as a ride 
in one of the little ferry steamers that ply between Liverpool 
and Birkenhead, or Seacombe and Tranmere. Gentlemen go 
coolly off to Melbourne and Port Phillip in alpaca coats and 
wide-awakes ; ladies, to Adelaide and Geelong with blue pokes 
to their bonnets, and lapsful of crochet work as though they 
were going picnicking. Sunburnt captains, bound for the 
other side of the world, set off in their shirt-sleeves, and tell 
their smiling cheerful spouses just to mind the baby, and have 
dinner ready at four o'clock in about eight months time or so, 
Oh, cheerily, cheerily ! Cheerily, oh ! A thousand hammers 
coopering water-casks take up the cry; a thousand shovels 
shovelling potatoes into the hold for stock re-echo it. Stand 
out of the way there ! Here is a waggon-load of preserved 
provisions : mock-turtle soup and stewed mushrooms in tin 
cases hermetically sealed ; green peas and fresh mint, to be 
eaten under the line. Make way there for the live stock for 
the emigrant ship, ' Gold Xugget' — sheep, poultry, and a milch 
cow. Mind yourself! a bullock has broken loose from the 
4 Jack Robinson, 3 for Sydney. He is a patriotic beast : England, 
with all its faults, he loves it still : and if he is to be made 
steaks of, he prefers being eaten on this side the equinoctial 
line. Stand from under ! a giant crane is hoisting blocks of 
Wenham Lake ice on board the Melbourne packet 'Bushranger.' 
They are all pressed for time, they are all going, cheerily, 
cheerily ; they are all, if you will pardon me the expression, 
in such a devil of a hurry. 

But the trunks, my dear sir, the trunks ! Can you, sensible, 



342 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

cautious, discreet, as I am sure you are, forbear, when you 
gaze on these trunks, forbear holding your head with your 
hands, or leaping into the air with a short howl, in sheer 
frenzy. The trunks ! Eoods, perches, acres of land covered 
with great sea-chests, trunks, bonnet-boxes, chaise-boxes, 
portmanteaus, valises, trunks of piebald leather, calf-skin, 
marble paper, morocco, Russia leather, oak, mahogany, and 
plain deal. Avalanches of trunks, with surely sufficient 
literature pasted inside to set up the schoolmaster abroad in 
Australia for years to come. As for such small articles as 
carpet-bags, desks, hat-boxes, writing-cases, and railway rugs, 
they are as plentiful as ratafia cakes, twenty a penny. Chil- 
dren of tender years stagger by with trunks ; stalwart porters 
cany piles of them, as waiters at eating-houses carry the tin 
dishes and covers. Grim spectres hover about, moaning 
weird complaints of phantom boxes lost or mislaid, and point 
with skinny fingers to invisible crockery-ware packed in 
straw. I come upon the lone female in the bombazine dress 
and the triangular bonnet. She sits forlorn, ' remote, un- 
friended, melancholy, slow,' inexpressible misery on her wan 
face, stranded high and dry on a band-box. Her ' things ' 
have departed from her ; an oak chest has been shipped bodily 
for Montevideo, and three mattresses and a palliasse went out 
to the best of her belief in the ' King Odin.' She is going to 
Celebes. ISTow what can this good woman be going to do at 
Celebes ? I puzzle myself mightily with this question, 
staring like one distraught at this lone woman, sitting under 
the dock shed like a Banshee on a band-box, till the edge of a 
hard-hearted oaken chest coming violently on my toes suffi- 
ciently admonishes me to mind my own concerns. 

Still cheerily, cheerily to all parts of the deep waters 
whither ships go, till I stroll down to a remote quay to change 
the scene, and see the Irish packets come in. Yet even here 
'tis but the old song to a somewhat fresher tune, for the mobs 
of poor Irish who are landed, pell-mell, from the Dublin, 
and Belfast, and Cork steamers, are off again for America to- 
morrow or the next day. Tumbling ashore they come— 
ragged, dirty, draggle-tailed, and (to trust their looks) half- 
starved. Gaunt reapers and bogtrotters in those traditional 
blue body-coats, leathern smalls, and bell-crowned hats, that 
seem to be manufactured nowhere save in Ireland ; grizzled 
old women, bent double with age and infirmity ; children who 
seem to have sprung up like some crass fungus of decomposi- 



than to have been born: bernly girls with 

shawls huddled over their heads. Some of the men have thick 

36, passably holey; but three-fourths of the female- and all 
children have neither shoes nor stockings. Some of the 

men carry heaps of what, at first sight, you might take 
for foul rags, but which, moving and crying suddenlv. you 

discover to be babies. Their luggage is on their backs, or 
in despairingly small and dirty bundles slung on sticks. 
They have a plurality of nothing save children. They may 
have money, some of these miserable objects — the bare price 
of their passage to America — sewn up in tattered petto: > 
and sleeve linings ; but. whether they have or not. they have 
no sooner set foot on the quay than they fall a-begging, 
tendering the hand for charity mechanically, as a snuff- 
taker's finger and thumb would seek his nose. They sit 
stolidly on posts, or crouch on the bare ground, staring around 
with vacant listless eyes, as though they had landed in the 
Mc :m and didn't know the way to the mountains in it. And, 
poor souls! for aught they know -of the land they have now 
set their weary feet upon, they might just as well be in the 
Moon, I trow. Presently come to them some of their own 
countrymen in darned cc te *nd patched -malls, keepers of 
styes called lodging-houses and dens called taverns. To these 
are they consigned and carried away ; and if they have any- 
thing to be robbed of. and are robbed, they have, at least, the 
satisfaction of being robbed by their compatriots. 

These woeful travellers have been gently pushed and 
hustled on* shore by hundred-, and when the last bell-crowned 
ha r s have passed the gangway I am about departing, when I 
am inf urine d that there is yet more live stock to be landed. 
More ! What more can remain after all this misery and all 
these rags, and all these walking typhus fever and small-pox 
hospitals ? 

As I have asked the quesfion, I must answer it. There is 
a great deal more on the deck of the steamer yet. Pigs more. 
Cattle more. Sheep more. Stand on the extreme verge of the 
quay and peep over on the deck of the steamer. Do not turn 
sick and rush away in horror, but look, Look at this Smithfield* 
in miniature : Smithfield. but infinitely more crowded in pro- 
portion: Smithfield, but ten times dirtier: Smithfield. with 
more cruelty, and wanton neglect, and shameful filth than 

* Fuit 



344 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

you would find any Monday or Friday morning between Cock 
Lane on the one side and Barbican on the other. Are you a 
Common Councilman ? If so, snuff up the balmy, piggy, 
beefy, muttony gale with a relish. Are you a slavery aboli- 
tionist? Look on these beasts so scientifically and geometrically 
packed for economy of space, that every sheep's leg fits into- 
its fellow's eye, and every bullock has a sheep between its 
horns, and you will have a very apt idea of how herrings are 
packed in a barrel, and how negroes are stowed for the Middle 
Passage. Are you a statist? Speculate on the exact amount 
of suffering, the nice quota of torture, the justly-balanced 
ratio of maddening thirst these miserable animals undergo 
during a twelve, a fifteen, or a twenty hours' passage. Are 
you a plain man with a plain English tongue ? Lift it up, 
and with a will, against the shameful cruelties of the cattle 
transit system ; against that monstrous inconsistency which 
can make governments and municipalities Argus-eyed to petty 
nuisances, and stone blind to these abominations ; which can 
make mayors, and corporations, and police authorities, strain 
at the gnat of an orange-woman or a halfpenny candle sold on 
a Sunday, and swallow this enormous camel. To look at these 
dumb creatures panting with agony, their tongues hanging 
out, their eyes dilated, their every muscle throbbing ; stag- 
gering on their legs, wallowing in filth, too stupified with 
agony to low, or bleat, or squeak, too sick to move, too cowed 
to struggle : is enough to rouse a man of adamant. Some of 
the animals are so wedged and packed together that they are 
suffocated, and not able even to lie down and die, die standing. 
Here is a wretched bullock — luckier than its fellows, for it 
has some two inches space on either side of it — lying desolate 
by the funnel, with its eyes piteously turned up, and seeming 
to entreat slaughter. Nor will slaughter be long in coming ; 
for the deputed slaughterer, nice in such matters, and knowing 
to a hair the power of endurance in the beast, kills it just before 
it would otherwise die. The dead carcase would be unsale- 
able, or at best would have to be surreptitiously disposed of ; 
but slaughtered alive, it is genuine imported meat, and fetches 
its price. 

Cheerily oh, cheerily ! 



345 ) 



XXX. 

HOW I WENT TO SEA. 

How many years ago is it, I wonder, when, resenting some- 
boyish grievance, deeply and irrecoverably irate at some 
fancied injury, wounded and exacerbated in my tenderest feel- 
ings, I ran away from school with the hard, determined, un- 
alterable intention of going on the tramp and then going to 
sea? The curtain has fallen years ago, and the lights have 
been put out long since, on that portion of my history. The 
door of the theatre has been long locked and the key lost 
where that play was acted. Let me break the door open now 
and clear away the cobwebs. 

About that time there must have been an epidemic, I think, 
for running away at Mr. Bogryne's establishment, Bolting 
House, Ealing. ' Chivying ' we called it. We had three or 
four Eton boys among us, who had carried out so well the 
maxim of Floreat Etona at that classic establishment, that they 
had flourished clean out of it; and — whether it was they 
missed the daily flogging, (Mr. Bogryne was tender-hearted) 
or the fagging, or the interminable treadmill on the Gracilis ad 
Parnassum (we were more commercial than classical) — they 
were always running away. One boy ' chivied ' in conse- 
quence of a compulsory small-tooth comb on Wednesday even- 
ings — he wouldn't have minded it, he said, if it had been on 
Saturdays. Another fled his Alma Mater because he was 
obliged to eat fat, and another because he could not get fat 
enough. Spewloe, our biggest boy, — who was the greatest 
fool and the best carpenter of his age I ever knew — caught 
the chivying disease of the Etonians, and was continually ab- 
sconding. He was always being brought back in a chaise-cart 
at breakfast-time, and spoiling our breakfast with his shrieks 
(he was fifteen, and bellowed like a bull) while undergoing 
punishment. They beat him, and he ran away the more. 
They took away his clothes, and he ran away the next day in 
the French master's pantaloons (crimson crossbars on an orange 
ground), and the knife-boy's jacket. They tried kindness with 
him, and fed him with large blocks of plum cake and glasses 
of ginger wine, but still he ran away. They rivetted a chain 
on him with a huge wooden log attached to it, as if he had 



346 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

been a donkey; but lie ran off next day, log and all, and was 
found browsing in a hedge, like an animal as lie was. At last 
they sent for bis Uncle, a fierce Being connected with the East 
Indies, in a blue surtout and white duck trousers ; so starched 
and stiff and cutting, that his legs looked, as he walked, like 
a pair of shears. He took Spewloe away ; but what he did 
with him I know not, for he never revealed the secrets of his 
prison-house. I saw him again, years afterwards, in a cab, 
with a tiger • his foolish face decorated with such tight 
whiskers and mustachoes, such a tight neckcloth, such tight 
boots and gloves and stays, that he could scarcely move. I 
believe he went into the army and to India, to fight the 
Affghans. I hope they proved less terrible to him than 
Bogryne, and that he did not run away from them. 

I think, were I to be put upon my affirmation relative to the 
cause of my running away from Mr. Bogryne's establishment, 
and going on tramp, that I should place it to the account of 
the Pie. There was a dreadful pie for dinner every Monday ; 
a meat pie with a stony crust that did not break ; but split 
into scaly layers, with horrible lumps of gristle inside, and such 
strings of sinew (alternated by lumps of flabby fat) as a ghoule 
might use as a rosary. We called it kitten pie—resurrection 
pie — rag pie — dead man's pie. We cursed it by night, we 
cursed it by day : we wouldn't stand it, we said ; we would 
write to our friends ; we would go to sea. Old Bogryne (we 
called him ' old ' as an insulting adjective, as a disparaging 
adjective, and not at all with reference to the affection and 
respect due to age) — old Bogryne kept Giggleswick the monitor 
seven hours on a form with the pie before him ; but Giggles- 
wick held out bravely, and would not taste of the accursed 
food. He boxed the ears of Clitheroe (whose father supplied 
the groceries to the establishment, and who was called in con- 
sequence ' Ginger ') like a sack, for remarking, sneeringly, to 
the cook, that he (Bogryne) never ate any of the pie himself, 
and that he knew the reason why. Candyman, my chum, found a 
tooth in the pie one clay — a dreadful double-tooth. Who was 
going to stop in a school where they fed you with double-teeth ? 
This, combined with the tyranny of the dancing-master, some 
difficulties connected with the size of the breakfast roll, and 
others respecting the conjugation of the verb tvtttoj, (for, 
though we were commercial, we learnt Greek, hang it !), and 
the confiscation of a favourite hocky stick — for which I had 
given no less a sum than fourpence and a copy of Philip 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 347 

Quarll — drove me to desperation. I ' chivied ' with the full 
intention of walking to Portsmouth, and going to sea. Lord 
help me ! 

One bright moonlight night I rose stealthily from my bed, 
dressed, and stole down stairs. I held my breath, and trod 
softly as I passed dormitory after dormitory; but all slept 
soundly. The French master — who was wont to decorate 
himself hideously at night with a green handkerchief round 
his head, and a night-garment emblazoned like the San benito 
of a victim of the Inquisition — gurgled and moaned as I passed 
his door : but he had a habit of choking himself in his sleep, 
and I feared him not. Clitheroe, who slept under the last 
flight of stairs, was snoring like a barrel organ ; and Eunks, 
his bedfellow, who was the best story-teller in the school, was 
telling idiotic tales, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, 
to himself in his slumbers. I crept across the playground 
cautiously, in the shadow of the wall. The play-shed ; the 
brick wall against which we were wont to play ' fives ; ' the trim 
little gardens, three feet by four, where we cultivated mustard 
and cress, and flowering plants which never flowered ; somehow 
seemed to glance reproachfully at me as I stole out like a 
thief in the night. The tall gymnastic pole on which we 
climbed appeared to cast a loving, lingering shadow towards 
me, as if to bring me back. The sky was so clear, the moon 
was so bright, and the fleecy clouds were so calm and peaceful 
as they floated by, that I half repented of my design and began 
to blubber. But the clock of Ealing church striking, called 
to mind the bell I hated most— the ' getting-up bell.' The pie, 
the tooth, the dancing-master, the diminished roll, and the 
Greek verb, came trooping up ; and, my unquenchable 
nautical ardour filling me with daring, I got over the low 
palings, and dropped into the high road on my way to sea. 

Nobody was in my confidence. Such friends and relatives 
as I had were far away, and I felt that ' the world was all 
before me where to choose.' My capital was not extensive. 
I had jacket, waistcoat, and trousers with the etceteras, half 
a crown in money, a curiously-bladed knife with a boat-hook 
and a corkscrew by way of rider, and an accordion. I felt 
that, with these though, I had the riches of Peru. 

To this day I cannot imagine what the New Police could 
have been about, that moonlight night, that they did not pounce 
upon me, many-bladed knife, accordion and all, long before I 
reached Hyde Park Corner. Nor can I discover why Mr. 



348 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Bogryne pursued me in a chaise-cart and sent foot runners 
after me up and down all roads save the very one I was 
walking quietly along. I must have looked so very like a 
runaway boy. The ink was scarcely dry on my fingers ; the 
traces of yesterday's ruler were yet fresh on my knuckles ; 
the dust of the play-ground adhered to my knees. 

A bed next night at a London coffee-shop ; a breakfast and a 
wild debauch on raspberry tarts and ginger-beer, very soon 
brought my half-crown to twopence, and I felt a lowness of 
spirits and the want of stimulants. A penny roll and a saveloy 
brought me to zero. The accordion was a bed the next night, 
and a sausage roll by way of breakfast, the next morning. 
The many-bladed knife produced a mouthful of bread and 
cheese and half a pint of beer for dinner. Then, having 
nothing, I felt independent. 

By some strange intuitive education, I felt myself all at once 
a tramp, and looked at the journey to Portsmouth quite philo- 
sophically. Curiously, when the produce of the many-bladed 
knife had been consumed and forgotten, and the want of 
another repast began to be very unpleasantly remembered ; it 
never once occurred to me to turn back, to seek assistance from 
any friend or friend's friend or boy's father with whom I had 
spent a holiday in London. It never struck me that if employ- 
ment were to be found at sea, there were docks and ships in 
London. I was bound for Portsmouth — why I know not — but 
bound as irrevocably as though I had a passport made out for 
that particular seaport, and the route was not by any means to 
be deviated from. If the London Docks were situated in New 
York, and if Blackwall were the port of Bombay, they could 
not, in my mind, have been more unattainable for the purpose 
of going to sea, than they were, only a mile or so off. I was 
not afraid of Mr. Bogyrne. I seemed to have done with him 
ages ago. I had quite finished and settled up accounts with 
him ; so it appeared to me. He, and the days when I wore 
clean linen, and was Master Anybody, with a name written in 
the fly-leaf of a ciphering-book ; with a playbox, and with 
friends to send me plum cakes and bright five-shilling pieces, 
were fifty thousand miles away. They loomed in the distance, 
just as the burning cities might have done to Lot's wife, very 
dimly indeed. 

It was Saturday afternoon. I well remember loitering some 
time about Vauxhall, and wondering whether that hot dusty 
road — with the odours of half a dozen bone-boiling establish- 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 349 

ments coursing up and down it like siroccos — could be near 
the fairy establishment where there were always fifty thou- 
sand additional lamps, and to which young Simms at Bolting 
House had been — marvellous boy ! — twice during the Midsum- 
mer holidays. After listlessly counting the fat sluggish barges 
on the river, and the tall dusty trees at Nine Elms (there was 
no railway station there then), I set out walking, doggedly. 
I caught a glimpse of myself in the polished plate-glass window 
of a baker's shop, and found myself to be a very black grimy 
boy. Vagabondism had already set its mark upon me. I 
looked, so long and so earnestly, in at the baker's window that 
the baker — a lean, spiky Scotchman (whose name, McCorquo- 
dale, in lean spiky letters above his shop-front, looked like 
himself), appeared to think I was meditating a bold border 
foray on his stock in trade, and rushed at me so fiercely round 
his counter with a bread-tin, that I fled like a young gazelle. 
I plodded down the Wandsworth road ; blushing very much 
as I passed people in clean shirts and well-brushed clothes, 
and pretty servant-maids, dressed out in ribbons like Maypoles, 
laughing and chattering in the gardens and at the doors of 
suburban villas. I had a dreadful qualm, too, on meeting a 
boarding-school for young gentlemen in full force, walking in 
procession two and two. As I passed the master — a stout man 
genteelly garotted in a white neckcloth, and walking severely 
with the youngest pupil as if he had him in custody — I 
shivered. Bolting House and Mr. Bogryne loomed, for an 
instant, not in the distance, but close upon me. Good gracious ! 
I thought — What if there should be some masonic intercourse 
between preceptors, relative to the recovery of runaways ; 
some scholastic hue-and-cry; some telegraphic detection of 
chivying ? But the schoolmaster passed me in silence, merely 
giving me a glance, and then glancing at his boys, as if he 
w T ould say, ' See, young gentlemen, the advantage of being 
boarded, washed, and educated in an establishment where 
moral suasion is combined with physical development (' Times,' 
August 20). If ever you neglect your use of the globes, or 
sneer at your preceptors, or rebel at pies, you may come, some 
day, to look like that.' The last and biggest boy, in a checked 
neckcloth and a stand-up collar, as I made way for him on the 
pavement, made a face at me. It was so like the face I used 
to make at the ragged little boys, when Bogryne's pupils went 
out walking, that I sat down on a dogs'-meat vendor's barrow 
and cried again. 



350 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

By some circuitous route which took me, I think, over 
Wandsworth Common, and through Eoehampton and Putney, 
I got that evening to Kingston-upon-Thamesi The sun was 
setting, as I leaned over the bridge. I was tired and hungry ; 
but, dismissing the idea of supper, as something not suffi- 
ciently within the range of possibility to be discussed, I 
certainly began to feel anxious concerning bed. Where or 
how was it to be ? Was it to be barn, or hay-rick, or out- 
house — or simply field, with the grass for a pillow, and the 
sky for a counterpane ? My thoughts were interrupted by a 
stranger. 

He was, like myself, a tramp : but, I think I may say 
without vanity, he was infinite^ more hideous to look at. 
Short and squat and squarely built, he had the neck of a bull 
and the legs of a bandy tailor. His hands were as the hands 
of a prizefighter. They were so brown and horny that where 
the wrists joined on to his arm you might fancy the termina- 
tion of a pair of leather gloves. His face was burnt, and 
tanned with exposure to sun and rain to a dull brickdust 
colour ; purple-red on the cheek-bones and tips of the nose 
and chin. Both hands and face were inlaid with a curious 
chequer-work of dirt, warranted to stand the most vigorous 
application of a scrubbing-brush. His head was close cropped 
like a blighted stubble-field, and his flabby ears kept watch 
on either side of it like scarecrows. He had pigs' eyes of 
no particular colour ; no eyebrows, no beard save a stubbly 
mildew on his upper lip like unto the mildew on a pot of paste, 
a ' bashed ' nose, and a horrible hare-lip. He had an indefinite 
jacket with some letters— a W, I think, and an I — branded 
on one sleeve, a pair of doubtful trousers, and something 
that was intended for a shirt. Kone of these were ragged, 
nor could they be called patched, for they were one patch. 
Finally, he had a bundle in his hand, a cap like a disc cut 
out of a door-mat on his head, and something on his feet 
which I took to be a pair of fawn-coloured slippers, but which 
I subsequently found to be a coating of hardened mud and dust 
upon his skin. 

He looked at me for a moment half curiously, half mena- 
cingly ; and then said, in a shrill falsetto voice that threw me 
into a violent perspiration : — 

' Where wos you a going to ?' 

I replied, trembling, that I was going to bed. 

4 And where wos you a going to sleep ?' he asked. 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 351 

I said I didn't know. 

He stroked the mildew on his lip and spoke again : — 

' I s'pose now you'd be a young midship mite ?' 

I am certain that I must have looked more like a young 
sweep, but I contented myself with saying that I did not 
belong to His Majesty's service ; — yet. 

' "What might you be a doing of, now?' he demanded. 

It was a dreadful peculiarity of this man that when he 
spoke he scratched himself; and that when he didn't speak 
he gave his body an angular oscillatory wrench backwards 
and forwards from the shoulder to the hip, as if he had some- 
thing to rasp between his jacket and his skin ; which there is 
no doubt he had. I was so fearful and fascinated by his 
uncouth gestures that he had to repeat his question twice 
before I answered : then, not knowing what to describe 
myself, (for I could not even assume that most ambiguous of 
all titles, a gentleman), I said, at hazard, that I was a tailor. 

' Where wos you a going to-morrow T 

I said, hesitatingly, to Portsmouth. 

c Ah ! to Portsmouth, 5 resumed the man, £ to Portsmouth, 
surely ! Have you got thruppence ?' 

I replied, humbly, that I hadn't. 

8 No more haven't I,' said the tramp conclusively ; ' not a 
mag.' 

There ensued an ambiguous, and, to me, somewhat terrifying 
silence. I feared that my companion was indignant at my 
poverty, and that, on the principle of having meal if he 
couldn't get malt, he would have three-pennorth of jacket, 
or three-pennorth of waistcoat, or three-pennorth of blood. 
But I was agreeably disappointed ; the villanous counte- 
nance of my companion cleared up ; and he said condescend- 
ingly— 

' I'm a traveller.' 

1 And a very evil-looking traveller, too,' I thought. 

' If you had got thruppence, and I had got thruppence,' he 
went on to say, ' I knows a crib down yonder where we 
might a snoozed snug. But if you ain't got nuffin, and I 
ain't got nuffin,' the traveller continued, quite in a didactic 
style, ' we must turn in at the Union. Do you know what 
the Union is ?' 

I had heard of the repeal of the Union, and the Union 
Jack, and one of our boy's fathers was a member of the 
Union Club. I had an indistinct notion, too, of an Union 



352 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

workhouse ; but my fellow-tramp had some difficulty in 
explaining to me that the Union was a species of gratuitous 
hotel ; a caravansary kept by the Poor Law Commissioners for 
the special relief of the class of travellers known in ordinary 
parlance as tramps, and in the New Poor Law Act as ' casual 
paupers ;' and where, in consideration of doing an hour's 
work in the morning, I could be provided with supper and 
a bed. 

We walked together to the house of the relieving officer to 
obtain tickets of admission. The functionary in question 
lived in a pretty little cottage, with a shining brass door-plate 
much too large for the door 5 and a fierce bell ; which, every 
time it pealed, shook the little house to its every honeysuckle. 
The parochial magnate was not at home ; but a rosy girl — 
with an illuminated ribbon and a species of petrified oyster as 
a brooch, and who was his daughter, I suppose — came to a 
little side window in the wall in answer to our summons ; 
and, scarcely deigning to look at us, handed us the required 
tickets. Ah me ! A twitch, a transient twitch came over 
me when I thought that there had been days when Master 
Somebody in a prodigious lay-down collar and white ducks, 
had walked with young ladies quite as rosy, with brooches 
quite as petrified, and had even been called by them, ' a bold 

Misery, they say, makes a man acquainted with strange 
bed-fellows ; but shall I ever again, I wonder, sleep in com- 
pany with such strange characters as shared the trusses of 
straw, the lump of bread, and slab of Dutch cheese, that night, 
in the casual ward of Kingston workhouse? There was a 
hulking fellow in a smock-frock, who had been a navigator, 
but had fallen drunk into a lime-pit and burnt his eyes out, 
who was too lazy to beg for himself, and was led about by a 
ragged, sharp-eyed boy. There were two lads who tramped 
in company : they had been to sea and were walking from 
Gosport to London. My fellow, the man with the wrench, 
had been born a tramp and bred a tramp ; his father was 
a tramp before him, and I dare say his children are tramps 
now. 

6 Yer see,' he deigned to explain to me, after he had de- 
spatched his supper, ' I likes change. I summers in the 
country, and winters in London. There's refuges and u res- 
sipockles," ' (by which, I presume, he meant receptacles) ' in 
winter time, and lots of coves as gives yer grub. Then comes 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 353 

spring time ; I gets passed to my parish — the farther off the 
better, and I gets a penny a mile. When I gets there I goes 
'cross country, on quite another tack. I knows every Union 
in England. In some they gives you bread and cheese, and 
in some broth, and in some skillygolee. In some they gives 
you breakfast in the morning, and in some they doesn't. You 
have to work your bed out. Here, Kingston way, you wheels 
barrows ; at Guildford you pumps ; at Eichmond you breaks 
stones ; at Farnham you picks oakum ; at Wandsworth they 
makes you grind corn in a hand-mill till your fingers a'most 
drops off at yer wristes. At Brighton now, they're a good 
sort, and only makes you chop up firewood ; but Portsmouth's 
the place ! You're a young un,' he pursued, looking at me 
benignantly, ' and green. Now, I'll give you a wrinkle. If 
you're a-going to Portsmouth, you manage to get there on a 
Saturday night ; for they keeps you all day Sunday, and they 
won't let you do no work ; and they gives you the jolliest 
blow-out of beef and taters as ever passed your breastbone. 
The taters is like dollops o'meal !' 

With this enthusiastic eulogium on the way in which they 
managed matters at Portsmouth, the traveller went to sleep — 
not gradually, but with a sudden grunt and jerk backward. 
The blind navigator and his guide had been snoring valo- 
rously for half an hour ; and the two sailor lads, after an 
amicable kicking match for the biggest heap of straw, soon 
dropped off to sleep, too. There was an unsociable tinker in 
the corner, who had smuggled in a blacking-bottle full of gin, 
notwithstanding the personal search of the workhouse porter. 
He gave no one, how r ever, any of the surreptitious cordial, 
but muddled himself in silence ; merely throwing out a 
general apothegm to the auditory that he preferred getting 
drunk in bed, as ' he hadn't far to fall.' He did get drunk, 
and he did fall. I was too tired, I think, to sleep ; but none 
of my companions woke during the night, save an Irish 
reaper who appeared more destitute than any of us ; but whom 
I watched, in the dead of the night, tying up some gold and 
silver in a dirty rag. 

Next morning was Sunday — a glorious, sunshiny, bird- 
singing, tree-waving Sunday. They turned us out at eight 
o'clock with a meal of hot gruel, and without exacting any 
work from us. The hereditary tramp and I walked together 
from Kingston to Esher. The navigator stopped in Kingston, 
having a genteel begging walk in the environs: and the 

2 A 



354 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Irishman sallied forth London-ward with a slipshod wife, and 
a tribe of ragged children, who had slept in the women's 
casual ward. With them went the two sailor lads ; one of 
whom, with a rough kindness that would have made me give 
him a penny if I had possessed one, carried the Irishwoman's 
sickly baby. 

4 Why don't you chuck them ere shoeses off?' asked my 
friend as we plodded along. ' They wouldn't fetch nothing, 
to sell, and they're only a bother to walk in, unless you was 
to put some wet grass in 'em. Look at my trotters,' he con- 
tinued, pointing to his feet, and tapping the sole of one of 
them with the blade of his knife, ' they'se as hard as bricks, 
they is. Go buff-steppered — that's the game.' 

Some remnants of Master Somebody's pride in his neat 
Bluchers must have lingered about me, for I declined the 
invitation to walk barefoot. 

' When'shoes is shoes,' pursued the tramp argumentatively, 
' they'se good for those as likes 'em, which I don't ; but when 
they're " crab-shells," and leaky and gummy in the soles, and 
lark-heeled the sooner you get shut of 'em the better. There's 
togs, too,' he pursued, looking with proper pride at his own 
attire, ' the sooner yon peels off them cloth kicksies the better. 
There ain't no wear in 'em, and they'se no good, if you ain't 
on the flash lay. My jacket 's Guildford gaol. My trousers is 
Dartford Union ; and my flannel shirt is the Society for the 
'Ouseless Poor. When I can't patch 'm no longer, and they 
gets all alive like, I tears up. Do you know what " tearing " 
up is ? A course you don't. Well, I goes to a Union a night, 
and I rips up into bits every mortal bit I has upon me. 
Then they comes in the morning, and they puts me into a 
sack, and they puts me in a cart and takes me afore the beak. 
Tearing up is twenty-one days, and quod meals, which is 
mind ye reglar, is good for a cove, and freshens him up.' 

Here he sat down on a milestone ; and producing a re- 
markably neat housewife case, proceeded to overhaul all parts 
of his apparel with as much care and circumspection as if 
they had been of purple and fine linen, catching up any stray 
rents and ' Jacob's ladders ' with a grave and deliberate 
countenance. 

How long this man and I might have kept company I am 
not prepared to say ; but we soon fell out. He descried, or 
fancied that he could descry, something in my face that would 
be sure to attract the sympathies of the benevolent, and 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 355 

loosen their purse-strings ; or, as he phrased it ' nobble the 
flats;' and he urged me with great vehemence, not only to 
beg pecuniary relief from all passers by, but also to diverge 
from the high road, and go 'a grub cadging,' i.e., to beg 
broken victuals at small cottages and gentlemen's lodge-gates. 
Finding that I was too shamefaced, he felt himself, I suppose, 
called upon to renounce and repudiate me as unworthy his 
distinguished company and advice ; and, telling me that I 
warn't fit for tramping nohow, he departed in great dudgeon 
down a cross road leading towards Eeading. I never saw 
him again. 

I walked that day — very slowly and painfully, for my feet 
had begun to swell — to Guildford. I was very hungry and 
faint when I arrived, but could not muster courage enough to 
beg. I had a drink or two of water at public-houses, going 
along, which was always readily granted ; and I comforted 
myself from milestone to milestone with the thought of a 
supper and bed at Guildford, where my ex-mentor had in- 
formed me there was a ' stunning Union.' But, woeful event ! 
when I got to Guildford, it was "full nine o'clock in the even- 
ing. The good people of that pleasant market town were 
taking their walks abroad, after church-service ; good, easy, 
comfortable, family folk — fathers of families — sweethearts in 
loving couples — all, doubtless, with cosy suppers to go home 
to, and snug beds — and knowing and caring nothing for one 
poor, soiled, miserable tramp, toiling along the highway with 
his fainting spirit just kept breast high by the problematical 
reversion of a pauper's pallet and a pauper's crust. I soon 
found out the relieving officer, who gave me my ticket, and 
told me to look sharp or the Union would be closed ; but I 
mistook the way, and stumbled through dark lanes, and found 
myself, weeping piteously and praying incoherently, in quag- 
mires ; and when I did get at last to the grim, brick, castel- 
lated Union-house, the gates were closed, and admission to 
the casual ward was impossible. The porter, a fat, timid 
man, surveyed me through the grate, and drew back again as 
by the light of a lantern he scanned my gaunt, hunger- 
stricken mien. He thrust a piece of bread to me between 
the bars, and recommended me to seek the relieving officer 
again, who, he said, would find me a bed. Then, he 
wished me good night, and retreated into his little lodge or 
den with the air of a man w T ho has got rid of a troublesome 
customer. 

2 A 2 



356 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Good night ! It began to rain, and to menace a thunder- 
storm ; but I sat down in a ditch, and devoured the bread. 
It was eleven o'clock, and I was wet to the skin ; when by 
dint of dodging up and down dark lanes, and knocking 
up against posts, and bruising my shins over mile-stones, I got 
to the relieving officer's again. 

The relieving officer lived up a steep flight of steps ; and, 
as 1 approached the bottom thereof, was peeping out at the 
door to see what sort of a night it was. He shook his head, 
either at the dirty aspect of the weather or at that of your 
humble servant, and was just about closing his door, when I 
ran up the steps and caught him by the coat-tail. 

' Dear-a deary me !' said the relieving officer, when I had 
explained my errand to him, ' dear-a deary me !' 

This was perplexing rather than encouraging ; and I 
waited some moments for a more definite communication. 
But, none came, and the relieving officer kept staring at me 
.with a bewildered expression, twitching nervously at a watch- 
ribbon meanwhile, and then whirling it round as if he in- 
tended presently to sling the seals at my head ; but I made 
bold to tell him what the porter had told me about his find- 
ing me a bed. 

1 Dear-a deary me !' said the relieving officer again, drop- 
ping the threatened missiles; but, this time, with a shake of 
the head that gave solemn significance to his words. * Where 
am I to find a bed ?' 

This was a question that 1 could not answer ; nor, ap- 
parently, could the relieving officer. So he changed the 
theme. 

6 There isn't such a thing as a bed,' he remarked. 

I don't think that he meant to deny the existence of such a 
thing as a bed, taken in ihe light of a bed ; but rather that he 
intended to convey the impossibility of there being such an 
institution as a bed for such as I was. 

' You must go further,' he said. 

' Where further ?' I asked desperately. 

' Oh, I'm sure I can't say,' replied the relieving officer : 
; you must go on. Yes,' he repeated with another stare of 
bewilderment and clutch at his watch appendages, ' go on — 
further — there's a good lad.' 

Whatever I may have found inclination to respond to this 
invitation, was cut short by the relieving officer shutting the 
door precipitately, and putting up the chain. So I did go on ; 



x 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 357 

but not much, further. I wandered down to the banks of the 
canal, where I found a coal-barge just unladen. It was very 
hard, and black, and gritty ; but I found out the softest board, 
and. in that barge, in spite of all the rain and the coal-dust, I 
slept soundly. 

From Guildford to Farnham next day. through Alton: 
where, if I remember right, the ale is brewed. My feet were 
terribly swollen and blistered: but. with a sullen pride I kept 
to my shoes. I have those shoes to this day in a neat ease. 
Such erabsheils ! It was just one o'clock when I walked into 
Farnham : but. I was so tired out. that, pending the open- 
ing of my hotel, the workhouse. I turned into a field, and slept 
there, under a hedge, until nearly eight o'clock. 

I may remark as a noteworthy feature of the frame of 
mind I must have been in during my tramp, that although 
I was a sharp boy. with a taste for art and a keen eye for the 
beauties of nature. I observed nothing, admired nothing — nor 
smiling landscapes, nor picturesque villages, nor antique 
churches. I saw. felt, thought, of nothing but of the mortal 
miles I had to walk. The counties of Surrey and Hampshire 
were to me but vast deserts of coach-roads, diversified by 
oases of milestones, with a Mecca or Medina, in the shape of 
an Union workhouse, at the end of each day's weary travel. 
I met wayfarers like myself, but they were merely duplicates 
of the sunburnt tramp, the Irish reaper, and the drunken 
tinker. There was. now and then, a stray Italian boy. and 
an Alsatian broom-girl or so : and once I met a philanthropist 
in a donkey-cart, who sold apples, onions, pots and pans, red- 
herrings, Common Prayer Books., and flannel. He gave me a 
raw red herring — if. being already cured, that fishy esculent 
can be said to be raw. Eaw or cooked, I ate it there and 
then. 

I never begged. Stout farmers' wives, with good-humoured 
countenances, threw me a halfpenny sometimes, and one 
pleasant- spoken gentleman bade me wait till he saw whether 
he could find sixpence for me. But he had no change, he 
said ; and, bidding me good evening in quite a fatherly 
manner, rode away on his dapple gray steed. Has he change,, 
now. I wonder r 

When I woke up I went straight to the workhouse. Farn- 
ham did not boast an Union, but had a workhouse of the old 
school. The master was a pleasant old man. with a large 
white apron, and gave me a liberal ration of bread and cheese. 



358 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

I happened to be the only occupant of the ward that evening ; 
and, being locked up early, I had time to look about rne, and 
select the cleanest and softest-looking truss of straw. The 
whitewashed walls were covered with the names of former 
tramps ; their poetical effusions and their political sentiments 
were scratched with nails or scrawled in charcoal. John 
Hind had laboured hard to rhyme ' workhouse ' with ' sor- 
row ;' but, although he had covered some six feet of wall 
with his efforts, he had not succeeded. Some anonymous 
hand had scrawled in desperate Eoman capitals ' God help 
the poor ;' to which I said ' Amen.' Mr. Jack Bullivant had 
recorded, in energetic but untranscribable terms, his dis- 
approval of the quality of the cheese; and J. Naylor had 
given vent to his democratic enthusiasm in ' Hurrah for uni ' 
- — something which looked like unicorn, but was intended, I 
fancy, to mean ' universal suffrage.' Chartism was the great 
wall-cry in those days. Close to the door was the sign 
manual of ' Paul Sweeny, bound to London with Fore Kids.' 
Motherless, perhaps. 

There had been one ' casual ' in before me ; but he was 
taken so violently ill immediately after his admission, that he 
had been removed into another out-house, on to a truckle 
bed : the rules of the establishment not permitting his being 
transferred to the infirmary. The poor wretch lay groaning 
piteously, as I could hear with painful distinctness through 
the thin wall that separated him from the casual ward. His 
groans became at last so appalling that they worked me into 
an agony of terror ; and 1 clung to the locked door (in the 
centre of which there was a largish grating) and beat against 
it, to the great disgust and irritation of the porter ; who, with 
a lantern at the end of a pitchfork, came in to look at the 
moribund occasionally, and who made a rush at me at last as 
he would have done at a young bull. ' It's all over with 
him,' he said to me in remonstrance ; ' so where's the good ? 
The doctor's gone to a birth ; but we've give him a bottle of 
stuff till he comes, and made him eomfable. So lie down.' 

TV hat ever the 'stuff' was — doctors' stuff, kitchen stuff, or 
household stuff — the miserable man continued ' moaning of his 
life out ' as the porter said querulously, until it was almost 
morning. Then the doctor (a pale, over- worked, under-paid 
young man with tight trousers, and spectacles, always in a 
chaise and a perspiration) came ; and I heard him tell the 
porter that the man would ' go off easily.' He presently did. 



HOW I WENT TO SEA. 359 

They let me out at eight o'clock — sick, dizzy, and terrified. 
c 1 told you so,' the porter said with apologetic complacency, 
"he went off quite " comfable." 3 This was his epitaph. 
Who he was or what he was — where he came from or whither 
lie was going — no man knew, and it was no man's business to 
inquire. I suppose they put him in the plain deal shell, 
which I saw the village carpenter tacking together as I turned 
down the street, and so lowered him under ground. They 
might have written l comfable ' on his tombstone, for any 
purpose a word would serve — if they gave paupers tomb- 
stones : which they do not. 

But, this poor dead unknown man did me a service. For, 
whether I was superstitious, or whether my nerves were 
unstrung, or whether repentance at my obdurate folly came 
tardily, but came at last, I went no farther on the way to 
Portsmouth, but thought I wouldn't go to sea, just at present, 
and tramped manfully back to Ealing, determined to take all 
Mr. Bogryne could give me, and be thankful. But I did not 
.get what I expected and what I deserved. I found anxious 
friends just on the point of putting out bills of discovery as 
for a strayed puppy ; I found a fatted calf already slaughtered 
— kindness, affection, forgiveness, and Home. 

There was but one drawback to my happiness. With some 
strong preconceiA'ed notion of the dreadful company I must 
have been keeping, and the horrible dens I must have so- 
journed in, my relations and friends found it to be their 
bounclen duty to wash me continually. "When it wasn't warm 
bath, it was yellow soap and scrubbing-brushes : and when it 
wasn't that, it was foot-bath. I was washed half away. I 
was considerably chafed, and morally hustled, too, by good 
pious relatives in the country ; who. for many months after- 
wards, were for ever sending me thick parcels ; which, see- 
ing, I thought to be cakes ; which, opening, I found to be 
tracts. 

I have walked a good deal to and fro on the surface of this 
globe since then ; but I have never been to sea — on similar 
terms — since, anv more. 



360 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

XXXT. 

FASHION. 

When a man applies himself soberly to reflect upon the fitness 
of things in general, and of their several tendencies towards 
the great End, of what a whirligig of vanity and inutility — of 
waste and glitter — the Great World seems to consist ! All 
these flounces and furbelows ; all this crinoline, bergamot, 
paste and jewellery, wax-chandlery, Brussels lace and Sevres 
china; all those jobbed horses, silken squabs, double and 
triple knocks, tags and embroideries and fripperies of the 
Heralds' College, what are they good for ? — what end do they 
serve ? All these mountebank bowings and reverences ; these 
kissings of hands and backing out of rooms of lath and plaster ; 
these clatterings about streets for the purpose of bandying pieces 
of engraved pasteboard ; these grinnings to your fellow worm 
of five feet long across a glass of grape juice ; these bawlings 
out of names by lacqueys ; these posturings and jumpings, and 
agonies of etiquette ; and turning day into night and night 
into day, and eating when we are not hungry, and drinking 
when we are not thirsty : all these, the life-chords of the 
Great World, to what end are they ? Who commanded them ? 
W^ho promulgated the statutes that regulate them ? If Fashion 
were a tangible idol with a frontal protuberance and a golden 
head, squatting on his hams in a pagoda like Juggernaut, we 
should not need to wonder at his votaries wearing absurd 
dresses and passing their lives in the performance of more 
absurd ceremonies. We might set down the worship to be a 
delusion ; but we might concede the dresses and the cere- 
monies to be the offspring of a sincere though mistaken super- 
stition, and to be typical or symbolic of something. But my 
lady Azalea, the Queen of the world of Fashion, is a member 
of the Church of England, as by law established, and she 
would be indignant if you were to ask her whether she wor- 
shipped a protuberant idol. Besides, Fashion is not tangible 
or palpable. ISTo one ever saw Fashion, or drew his (or her ?) 
portrait, or promulgated the conditions of his (or her ?) creed, 
or taught what is heterodox or what orthodox ; except one 
vulgar pretender who wrote a Handbook of Etiquette ; which, 
for any authority it was grounded on, might as well have 
been a handbook to the Bear Garden. 



9 



FASHION. 361 

What are the laws of Fashion, and who made them ? Who 
regulates their absurdities and their proprieties ? It was the 
height of fashion in Charles the Second's time to display about 
four inches of white shirt between the waistband and the 
vest ; now if I were to enter a ball-room with my shirt bulging 
from the bottom of my waistcoat I should be bowed down 
stairs. Why should Fashion in sixteen hundred and sixty- 
three be beauty, and impropriety in eighteen hundred and 
fifty-nine? Can anything be absurd er than the present 
chimney-pot hat? Nothing. Yet, if you were to meet me in 
Eegent Street with a hunting cap, a shovel hat, a sombrero, 
or a fur porringer like that which Henry of Lancaster wore — 
would you speak to me ? The day after to-morrow velvet 
skulls, shovel hats, flip-flaps, or rabbit-skin porringers may be 
the only wear. Why should the bishop have refused to or- 
dain Oliver Goldsmith, because he wore scarlet breeches? 
What are wigs, boots, colours, fashionable virtues, fashionable 
vices, boa ton, high breeding, worth, after all? Will they save 
1 the sprightliness of youth, the fair cheeks and full eyes of 
childhood, the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints, of 
twenty-five,' from the ' hollo wness and deadly paleness, the 
loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial ?' Will they 
avail us one jot in the day when you and I and all the world, 
' nobles and learned, kings and priests, the wise and the fool- 
ish, the rich and the poor, the prevailing tyrant and the op- 
pressed party shall all appear to receive their symbol ?' Will 
Fashion and Madame Devy and the Eed-book keep the ' storm 
from the ship or a wrinkle from the brow, or the plague from 
a King's house ?' Is the world any better for Fashion, and could 
it not move towards its end without Fashion, do you think? 

6 A man,' says a divine I love to quote, ' may read a sermon 
the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he 
shall but enter into the supulchre of kings * * * * 
where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie in- 
terred, and the king must walk over his grandsire's head to 
take the crown.' Now what a homily might a man read over 
second-hand court dresses, over a Court Circular, or over a 
Eed-book two years old ! How sharp one might be upon the 
miserable vanity of superfluities, and the uselessness of lux- 
uries. How easily we could do without them. 

' Give hat to nature that which nature needs, 
Man's life is cheap as beast's.' 



362 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

You, and I, and the king, could live on sixpence a day, and 
never go hungry. But after all, in the very midst and flow of 
this our homilies and this sharpness of our exhortation, comes 
this thought to make us pause before we go with unwashed 
faces to live in a tub like Diogenes, or to hide ourselves 
in a cave, and cover ourselves with the skins of wild beasts, 
as Jean-Jacques Eousseau talked of doing, or to dig up pig- 
nuts for food, and shovel gold away as if it were mud, like 
Timon in the play. For we begin to think how many thousand 
men and women in England, and how many millions more 
throughout the world, earn their daily bread by making and 
vending Fashion's elegant trumpery; — gloves, fans, spangles, 
scents, and bon-bons : how ships, colonies, and commerce, are 
all mixed up in a curious yet congruous elaboration with 
these fal-lals : how one end of the chain may be my lady's 
boudoir and its knick-knacks in Belgravia, and the other end a 
sloppy ship-dock on the hot strand of the Hooghly ; how the 
beginnings of a ball supper, with its artificial flowers, its 
trifles, its barley-sugar temples, its enamelled baskets and 
ratifia cakes, were the cheerless garret and the heated cellar : 
how the Immensities of the world — its workshops, and marts, 
and bourses, and chambers of commerce — are, after all, only 
an accumulation of these fashionable littlenesses in bulk; 
packed into huge bales and casks, registered in ledgers and 
day-books, and sent and re-sent in strong ships, with bills of 
lading and charter-parties, to the uttermost ends of the earth. 
Pause before you condemn Yanity Fair — reflect for a minute 
before you run to the justice's to have its charter taken away. 
Obadiah Broadbrim has helped to stock it ; conventicles have 
been built from its profits; the crumbs that fall from its 
table feed millions of mouths. Xor does the beneficence of 
Fashion end here. After she has made one set of fortunes at 
first hand she showers her favours on trade at second-hand. 
From second-hand court dresses, and from second-hand fashion 
of all kinds, the moral of Fashion can be more strongly 
pointed, than from Fashion herself when arrayed in all her 
glory. 

Let us instance Mrs. Brummus. She is the mysterious 
female who deals in second-hand ladies' apparel. I look upon 
Mrs. Brummus's vast silent repository of last season's varie- 
ties with the awe I have for a family vault ; for the scenery 
of a worn-out pantomime ; for undertakers' Latin (in oil 
colours) ; for last year's Belle Assemblee, or for the tailor's 



FASHION. 383 

plate of tlie fashions and the Court Guide for the year 
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight, 

Mrs. Bruramus's repository nestles as Milton's fountain did, 
in ' the navel of a wood/ quite in the core of a cancer of 
dingy, second-hand streets and houses. Both Mrs. Brurarnns 
and her shop have, moreover, a dingy, faded, second-hand 
appearance. They remind you of the magnificent allocution 
of the lady to the quondam dealer in second-hand apparel in 
Congreve's comedy ; ' You that I took from darning of old 
lace and washing of old gauze, with a blue-black nose over a 
chafing-dish full of starved embers, behind a traverse-rag, in 
a shop no bigger than a bird-cage !' The chafing-dish and 
the blue-black nose may be gone ; but there is yet a mar- 
vellous touch of the bird-cage about Mrs. Brummus's shop : 
there is yet the traverse-rag, the torn lace to be darned, and 
the old gauze to be washed. 

Enter. Here is the discarded wardrobe of those enchant- 
ing actresses, those ravishing songtresses, those bewitching 
dancers, who have so enthralled and delighted Fashion ; who 
have drawn rapturous plaudits from Fashion's kid-gloved 
hands : melting sighs from under Fashion's white waistcoats ; 
tender glances from Fashion's double-barrelled lorgnettes ; 
lisps of praise from Fashion's mustachioed lips, when the 
wearers of those dresses acted, and sang, and danced on Fa- 
shion's great chalked stage — upon that stage where there are 
more sinks and rises, more drops, fiats, borders, set pieces, 
wings, and floats ; where there are more changes of scene, 
spangled vanities, more going down graves and vampire traps ; 
where there are more music, dancing, gay clothes, red and 
white paint, hollow hearts and masks for them to wear, than 
you would find on the stage of the largest playhouse in the 
world. Suspended and recumbent, folded up, stretched out, 
singly and in heaps, in Mrs. Brummus's birdcage shop in 
dimly distant crypts, and parlours, and crannies, and cup- 
boards, and lumbering old presses, and groaning shelves, 
are the crimson velvet dresses of duchesses, the lace that 
queens have worn, our grandmothers' brocaded sacks and 
hoops and high-heeled shoes, fans, feathers, silk stockings, 
lace pocket-handkerchiefs, scent-bottles, the Brussels lace veil 
of the bride, the sable bombazine of the widow, embroidered 
parasols, black velvet mantles, pink satin slips ; blue kid, 
purple prunella, or white satin shoes ; leg of mutton, bishop, 
Mameluke sleeves ; robes without bodies and bodies without 



364 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

robes, and sleeves without either ; the matron's apron and the 
opera dancer's skirt. Here is Fashion in undress, without its 
whalebone, crinoline, false hair, paint, and' pearl powder; 
here she is tawdry, tarnished, helpless, inert, dislocated, like 
Mr. Punch's company in the deal box, he carries strapped 
behind his back. 

If there be one article of commerce which Fashion delights 
in more than another, it is Lace. The rich products of 
Mechlin, Valenciennes, Brussels, and Liege; the scarcely less 
valuable wares of Nottingham and Honiton ; the almost price- 
less remnants of c old point ' — • beggars' lace ' — the lace that 
Henrietta Maria loved to wear and Vandyck to paint. Not 
one of Mrs. Brummus's tattered morsels of lace but has 
its history and its moral. Here is the veil in which poor 
Clara Eackleton was married to Captain Middleman. They 
had a grand estate (grandly encumbered) at Ballyragget in 
the county Galway. Charley Middleman kept hounds and 
open house ; and his widow lives now in a boarding-house at 
Tours with her two daughters. Clara's Brussels lace veil was 
not sold by her lady's maid nor by the bride herself. It was 
neither lost nor stolen ; but Captain Middleman, formerly of 
the twenty-fifth Hussars, privately conveyed Mrs. Middleman's 
veil, together with two ostrich feathers and a carved ivory 
Chinese fan, to Mrs. Brummus's emporium. He drove the 
bargain, he pocketed the money, and he lost that same money 
half an hour afterwards at chicken-hazard, at the Little Nick 
near Leicester Square. 

A wedding-dress — all white satin, lace, and silver sprigs. 
Methinks I can see it now, glistening and sparkling in the 
August sun, and rustling and crumpling in the August air, 
as at the close of the London season its beautiful wearer 
descends that ugly narrow little staircase, which has been a 
ladder of delight to so many, a via dolorosa to so many more, 
and which leads from the vestry-room of St. George's, Ha- 
nover Square, into Maddox Street. The wearer of the satin 
dress comes down the shabby steps a wedded bride. She is 
married to a lord ; a duke has given her away. Fourteen 
young bridesmaids in white have wept at the responses. Two 
have fainted, and one has been carried into the vestry, to be 
sal-volatilised. A nervous clergyman has addressed the bride- 
expectant as ' Thomas, wilt thou have this man to be thy 
wedded wife?' The bridegroom has been seized with the 
usual deadly perturbation, and offered to place the ring on the 



FASHION. 365 

finger of the pew-opener; and the clerk, while gravely cor- 
recting the errors of all parties, has viewed the whole proceed- 
ings with an air of deep misanthropy. At last, somehow or 
other, the right man has married the right woman ; the pew- 
opener and beadle have been feed, and the verger remembered ; 
the clergyman has had his rights and the clerk his dues. 
The licence has been conned over ; the register has been 
signed — by the bridegroom in character meant to be very 
valiant and decided, but in reality very timorous and indis- 
tinct ; by the bride with no pretence or compromise, but in a 
simply imbecile and hysterical manner ; by the father of the 
bride in a neat hand I should like to see at the bottom of a 
cheque ; and by big General Gwallyor of the Indian army (the 
additional witness) in«a fierce military manner, with a dash, 
at the end like an oath. The little boys have shouted, and 
the wedding-carriage, with its crimson-vested post-boys and 
spanking grays, has clattered up ; the policemen have put 
down an imaginary riot, threatened with their batons the 
crowd generally, and menaced with arrest one individual 
lamp-post ; and then, shining out like a star among the silver 
favours and orange flowers, the snowy dresses and black dress 
coats, the smiles and tears, comes the bride : God bless her ! 
Is there a sight more beautiful under heaven than a young 
bride coming out of church ? Can you forget Sir John Suck- 
ling's beautiful lines in his ballad upon a wedding ? — 

1 Her feet beneath her petticoat 
Like little mice stole in and out, 

As if they feared the light. 
And then she dances such a way, 
No sun upon an Easter-day 

Is half so fine a sight.' * 

Now, alas ! my lord is at Florence, my lady is in furnished 
lodgings in London, and the bride's dress is at Mrs. Brurnmus's. 
There was an action at law in the Court of Probate and 
Matrimonial Causes respecting them not long since ; and 
numberless suits in all sorts of courts are pending between 
them now. My lord hates my lady, and my lady hates my 
lord; and they write abusive letters against each other to 
their mutual friends. 

Fashion is born, is married, and dies every year, and 
Fashion is buried in Mrs. Brurnmus's dusky shop ; she watches 

* Founded on a beautiful old superstition of the English peasantry that 
the sun dances upon an Easter morning. 



366 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

its funeral pyre, and superintends the process of its incinera- 
tion ; until, phoenix-like$ it rises again from its ashes to die 
again. 

Fashion dies. It is so far like a prince or a rich man that 
while it lives we dress it up in purple and fine linen, and fall 
down and worship it, and quarrel with and hate our brothers 
and sisters, for a smile from our demi-god, for a card for 
Fashion's balls or the entree to Fashion's back-stairs. But no 
sooner is the demi-god dead than we utterly desert and 
forget it. We do not condescend, as in the case of dead 
humanity, to fold its rottenness in gold and crimson velvet, to 
build a marble monument above it, sculptured all over with 
lies ; to state in an inscription that beneath reposed the ashes 
of such and such a most noble, high, mighty, powerful 
Prince Fashion, who was a father to his subjects, and a model 
to his compeers, and was in short the very best Fashion that 
ever was known, and the first fashionable gentleman in the 
world. No, we allow the corpse of Fashion to putrefy in the 
gutter, or to be eaten up by the vultures and the storks, and 
adjutant birds. There have been kings even treated as cava- 
lierly. When the luxurious Louis Quinze lay at the point of 
death, the noise of the courtiers deserting their monarch to pay 
their respects to the new king elect echoed through the long 
galleries of Versailles like thunder. When the old king was dead 
they crammed his miserable body (he died of the most horrible 
form of small-pox) into a box, and jolted him off in a post- 
chaise by night to St. Denis, where they flung him into rather 
than buried him in the sepulchre of his ancestors. So do we act 
by our dead King Fashion — adding even insult to injury ; for, 
after his death we scoff and jeer at him, and are tremendously 
satirical upon the ridiculous, hideous, frightful, preposterous 
fashion that he was. It is my opinion that if Messrs. Banting 
and Prance were to confine themselves to performing the 
funerals of Fashion, they would cease to be the fashionable 
undertakers they are. 

Fashion is greater than king or kaiser when he is alive ; 
but dead, he is of no more account than a broken egg-shell* 
Le roi est mort — vive le roil Leg-of-mutton sleeves and short 
waists are dead. Long live tight sleeves and long waists ! 



( 867 ) 
[ XXXII. 

YELLOWKNIGHTS. 

When Eoscius was an actor in Borne, I think it highly 
probable that private theatricals, imitative of the perform- 
ances of the great dramatic exemplar of the day, were a 
highly popular amusement among the juvenile Eoman aris- 
tocracy. It is pleasant as well as reasonable to think so. 1 
would have given something to have been able to witness 
such a celebration in the great city of men ; and that such 
sights often took place I have very small doubts. That 
amiable system of classical education under which you and I, 
my dear Hopkins, were reared, but which our sons, let us 
hope, will mercifully escape — that grand scheme of gram- 
matical tuition which held chief among its axioms that the 
mind of youth, like a walnut-tree, must be quickened by 
blows in its advances to maturity ; that the waters of Helicon 
were not wholesome unless duly mingled with brine; and 
that the birch and the bays were inextricably interwoven in 
the poetical chaplet — that system, I say, taught us (among 
irreproachable quantities and symmetrical feet) to look upon 
everything appertaining to Eome and the Eomans with some- 
thing very much akin to horror ; to regard Plautus as a bugbear 
and Terence as a tyrant ; to remember nothing of Horace but 
the portrait of his schoolmaster — nothing of Virgil but the cruel 
memory of Juno. But now that a new generation has grown up, 
and we ourselves (according to an ingenious theory some time 
propounded) have changed our cuticle, and have had provided 
for us a new set of viscera, we can afford to look back without 
bitterness or regret, without fear or trembling, upon the old 
days of verbum personate and studio grammatical. Queer days ! 
They would have flogged us for reading Mr. Macaulay's 
' Lays,' and caned us had we looked upon Lempriere, not as 
a dull book of reference, but as the most charming collection 
of fairy tales in the world. Xow all our gerunds and supines, 
our dactyls and spondees, our subjects and attributes, our 
hexameters and pentameters, are mingled in a pleasant jumble 
of dreamy memories : now that we quite forget what took 
place in the thirty-sixth Olympiad, and don't know the names 



368 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

of the forty tyrants, and can't remember the value of an As or 
the number of stadia between Eome and Capri (I speak 
for myself, Hopkins) — we can indulge in the- fancy that the 
Eomans were not at all times frowning, awful spectres, 
with hook-noses, laurel-bound brows, and flowing togas, 
incessantly occupied in crossing the Eubicon, subduing 
the Iceni, reviewing the tenth legion, striking Medusa- 
like medals, standing behind chairs with hatchets and 
bundles of rods, or marching about with S. P. Q. E. stuck on 
the top of a pole. Cicero pleaded against Verres, but there 
were other advocates to plead in the cause of a countryman's 
pig. The geese were not always saving the Capitol — ' bo' must 
have been occasionally said to them, and they eaten with sage 
and onions sometimes. The Cumsean sybil must have taken 
a little snack on her tripod from time to time. Maecenas 
must have made jokes, great Caesar stooped to pun, and stern 
Brutus played with his children. Yes ; among all this 
solemn bigwiggery — these triumphs, ovations, sacrifices, 
orations (in which a tremendous amount of false Latin 
was talked, you may be sure), there must have been a 
genial, social, homely, comic element among the Eoman 
citizens. Who shall say that there were not Cockney Eomans 
who pronounced vir, loir, and dropped the H in Horrida? 
"Who shall say that there were no games at blindman's-bufF, 
forfeits, and hunt the slipper, on long winter evenings, in the 
great Consular families ; that there was no kissings under 
the mistletoe in the entertainments of the Eoman knights ; 
that there were no private theatricals, blithesome, ridi- 
culous, and innocent, what time Eoscius was an actor in 
Eome? 

For that matter, I am persuaded that, long before, Thespis's 
little brothers and sisters performed tragedies in a go-cart, 
not in socks and buskins, but in socks and pinafores, before 
their big brother took to the legitimate business in a waggon ; 
and that Alcibiades got up a private pantomime among his 
friends, parodying Aristophanes' Knights, with himself 
(Alcibiades) for clown, Socrates for pantaloon, and Glycerium 
for columbine. But confining ourselves to Eome, would you 
not have delighted to have witnessed some ancient private 
theatrical entertainment in the now capital of the papal 
dominions? It is good (confounding chronology) to fancy 
the largest lamp lit ; the Atrium fitted up, draped with some 
borrowed togas ; the patres conscripti in the front rows, the 



YELLOWKNIGHTS. 369 

matres conscript! behind, among them, of course, the mother of 
the Gracchi, thinking the performances of her children the 
most wonderful that ever were seen, but entertaining no very- 
exalted opinion of the dramatic efforts of Master Marcus 
Anton ius Lepidus, aged nine, or of that conceited little 
upstart Fatua Fanna, who would not be allowed to play at 
all if she were not the niece of the Pontifex Maximus. See — 
there are the blushing, simpering young Eoman virgins, all 
in tine white linen with silver hems, and their tresses powdered 
with gold-dust. There is pretty little Livia Ottilia, the great 
heiress, whose cruel papa wanted her to give up her large 
fortune towards the expenses of the Punic war, and become a 
vestal virgin ; but she knew better, and ran off to Brundusium 
with young Sextus Quintilius. There is demure little Miss 
Octavia Prima — she looks as though spikenard would not 
melt in her mouth ; who would think, now, that she sticks 
gold pins into the shoulders of her slaves, and beats her 
lady's-maid with the crumpling-irons ? There are the young 
Eoman beaux, terrible fellows for fast chariot-driving, wild- 
beast fighting, gladiator backing : yonder is young Flavins, 
the president of the Whip Club ; his motto is, Quousque 
tandem : there, ambergrised, powdered, perfumed, is that 
veteran toad-eater and tuft-hunter, but pretty poet, Q. Horatius 
Flaccus ; he will write a charming copy of Sapphics on the 
occasion, dedicated to his influential patron, the Marquis 
Maecenas, who will probably ask him to dinner and give him 
roast pig stuffed with honey, garum, and slave-fed carp. 
There is Ovidius Naso, who was a fine man once, but now 
goes among the gay youths by the name of Nosey. He has 
led a very dissipated life, and will be compelled to fly from 
his creditors by-and-by, to some remote corner of Asia Minor, 
attributing, of course, his forced absence to political reasons. 
There also, among the audience, you may see P. Virgilius 
Maro, in top-boots and a bottle-green toga. He, too, is a poet, 
but is a great authority on matters bucolic, breeds cattle, is 
a magistrate of his county, and president of the Campanian 
Agricultural Association. There is Curius Dentatus, that 
conceited fop, who is always showing his white teeth ; and 
Aulus Gellius, who is a very Othello to his wife ; and 
Pompeius Crassus, who is considered to be very like his 
friend Caesar ; and Mark Antony, who has incurred something 
like odium for his naughty conduct towards Mrs. Mark, and 
his shameful carryings on with a mulatto lady in Egypt ; and 

2 B 



370 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

there is Cato, the censor, who disapproves of theatricals, 
public and private, in the abstract, turning up his nose in a 
corner and pretending to read the last number of * Sybilline 
Leaves.' But, mercy on us ! what chronology is this ? Mark 
Antony, Curius Dentatus, and Cato the censor! As well 
have Komulus and Bemus with the wolf in for the last scene, 
Numa Pompilius to give the entertainment, and Horatius 
Codes to announce that a shell-fish supper is ready. Away, 
pleasant and most ignorant fancies ! 

The mind of my life is as a cemetery, full of gravestones ; 
but here and there are gay cenotaphs, airy temples of the 
composite order, with comic masks sculptured on the pedi- 
ment, — flower-grown tombs, sacred to private theatricals. This 
pen shall be a key, and open one of them. 

There was ' Yellowknights. 5 Yellowknights was the com- 
modious family mansion of Hipkins Hawes, Esquire, a man 
of the richest, but of the merriest and the best. He had a 
prodigious number of daughters, all pretty ; and envious 
people said that his private theatricals were only baits to lure 
young men on to matrimonial destruction. He must have 
been very indiscriminate in his luring, be it as it may, for he 
was visited by a whole colony of sexagenarian gentlemen 
living in the vicinity, who cared, I think, much more about 
his rare old port than his performances, and by a host of 
children, among whom I can mention one youth, aged eight, 
who was decidedly not lured by any matrimonial snares with 
reference to the Miss Haweses, but by a juvenile predilection 
for plum cake, orange wine, trifle, a glorious grapery, an 
unrivalled nectarine wall, and a whole Tower armoury of 
toys, rocking-horses, cricket-bats, electric ducks, regiments of 
soldiers, and India-rubber balls like balloons. Of course I 
fell in love with all the Miss Haweses afterwards ; but some- 
how they all married somebody else. Perhaps my hair didn't 
curl, so 1 could not come into wedlock with them. Hipkins 
Hawes took the young men exactly as they came, and as he 
found them. ' If the fellows,' he was wont to say (he was a 
plain-spoken man), ' come after my gals, let 'em. If Loo 
or Bell are sweet upon Jack or Dick, let them, come to Hip- 
kins Hawes and tell him what they mean, and he'll see what 
to do. Hipkins Hawes knows how many blue beans make 
five.' Hipkins Hawes did. Though he lived in that grand 
and commodious mansion Yellowknights, and kept horses, 
carriages, and footmen, he had formerly ™v~sued no more 



YELLOWKNIGHTS. 371 

elevated a calling than that of a coach-builder ; and many and 
many a holiday afternoon have I spent in gazing at and 
admiring the wonderful lord mayors' and sheriffs' coaches 
that Hipkins Hawes built at his grand repository in Orchard 
Street, Portman Square. To be lifted into one of these car- 
riages, and to sit for a moment on one of those imperial 
squabs, was to me then the summum bonum of human feli- 
city. What would I give to be able to feel such a pleasure 
now ! 

We, the family of your informant, were humble neighbours 
of the wealthy Yellowknights people ; dwelling, indeed, in a 
detached cottage, where an attempt at gentility was made by 
the existence of a coach-house and a two-stall stable, but the 
vehicular accommodation of the first of which was only called 
into requisition for a child's chaise, and in the second of 
which trunks, lumber, and odds and ends cumbered the 
manger, and refused not to abide by the crib. The great 
mansion and our genteel cottage were both in a small village 
some five miles from London, with which communication was 
kept up by a bi-daily stage-coach. I went down to the 
village the other day by rail. Our genteel habitat had been 
pulled down bodily, and our two-stall stable occupied perhaps 
a hundredth part of the ground on which a mighty circular 
stable for roaring locomotives had been built. Yellowknights 
— where was that commodious mansion? It had been con- 
verted into a ladies' school — no : the South-Southern Branch 
College for Ladies. Lecturer on physical astronomy, Pro- 
fessor Charles S. Wain ! Hipkins Hawes is Sir Hipkins 
Hawes, Bart., now, and dwells in a mansion at Tyburnia as 
big as a barrack. 

But in the old days Hipkins Hawes, the retired coach- 
builder, was the merriest, most hospitable, charitable soul on 
the whole suburban country-side. He was always giving 
balls, suppers, fetes champetres, archery meetings, charades, 
fancy-dress soirees, and especially private theatricals. The 
Miss Haweses used to drive to London in carriages and four 
(it was not considered extravagant to drive four horses then, 
and I have seen a great duchess, dead and gone, riding in a 
coach and six), convulse Holywell Street, and throw Vinegar 
Yard into an uproar, in voyages of discovery after theatrical 
costumes. They were quite costume-books themselves. I 
think I must have seen the eldest Miss Hawes as a Bayadere, 
Lady Macbeth, Columbine (in Turkish trousers), the Fair 

2 b 2 



372 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

One with the Golden Locks, Zuleika, Clari the Maid of 
Milan, Ophelia (a very, cheap costume, consisting in the last 
part merely of a bedgown and back hair), Mrs. Haller, and 
Flora Macdonald. As to the youngest Miss Hawes, she was 
so incessantly playing fairies, sylphs, and Ariels, that at this 
day I can't help picturing her to myself with wings, a silver- 
foil wand, and a short muslin skirt ; though I know her to be 
married to Mr. Bearskin (of Bull and Bearskin, stockbrokers) 
and the mother of six children. Then the young Haweses 
(males), of whom there was a swarm, all six feet high, in the 
army, the navy, the Church, Cambridge University, Guy's 
Hospital, and the Charter House, were continually busy with 
private theatricals ; painting scenes on the lawn, modelling 
comic masks in clay, putting the footboy to hard labour in 
whitewashing, pulling up the dining-room flooring for traps, 
purloining the sheets and table-cloths for ghosts, blowing up 
the greenhouse with badly-made fireworks, stifling the ser- 
vants with premature red fire, and, in fact, as Mrs. Hip kins 
Hawes said (the only person at Yellowknights who did not 
approve of private theatricals), ' turning the house out of 
windows.' She was a weak lady, subject to headaches, and 
with an expressive but somewhat monotonous formula of 
reply to every remark, namely, ' stuff and nonsense.' Said 
the doctor to her, when at last she lay mortally sick, ' I fear, 
madam, that you are seriously indisposed,' thereupon, 
6 Stuff and nonsense !' cried out Mrs. Hipkins Hawes, and 
died. 

Hipkins Hawes himself did not take any active part in the 
private theatricals, save paying good round sums for the 
expenses incurred, and enjoying in a most beaming manner 
the enjoyments of the children he loved so well. His prin- 
cipal employment was to sit at the great French windows 
overlooking the lawn, drink old port, and tell funny stories to 
young Bearskin, the stockbroker, and to Captain Chuff, who 
had been a king's messenger, had travelled the wide world 
over, had a wonderful potato snuff-box, presented to him by 
the Emperor Alexander's aide-de-camp, and was reported to 
be a gay man. I never knew any one seem happier, more 
contented, more at peace with the world and himself than 
Hipkins Hawes, the retired coach-builder, then a florid, bald- 
headed, fair, round-bellied proprietor, aged fifty. He would 
hold the prompt-book during the rehearsals of his children's 
plays, and make tremendous mistakes in his self-imposed 



YELLOWKNIGHTS. 373 

task. He would laugh, the loudest at the jokes, and clap his 
fat hands, and take the little children who had played the 
fairies on his knee and kiss them. Ah ! those were the days 
of pipe and labour, of joy and gladness, of cake and wine ; of 
the mirror before any of the quicksilver at the back is worn 
off; of the plated service before whitening and chamois 
leather have been too often used, and the copper begins to 
show. We youngsters were frequent guests at Yellow- 
knights, partly, perhaps, because all youth was welcome at 
that universal children's fiiend society; partly because we 
were considered to be (T say it without vanity — woe is me !) 
a somewhat clever family. I had a brother who was a great 
chemist, who always had particoloured ringers and stained 
clothes, who burnt holes in all the blankets with noxious 
acids, who once nearly blew the front of the house out with 
some subtle chemical preparation, and who was always trying 
experiments upon the cat.* I had a brother who had a won- 
derful genius for drawing ships. He drew so many of them 
on the margins of his spelling-book, that he quite overlooked 
the words ending in one or more syllables, or the book itself, 
and turned out an egregious dunce. 1 had a brother who 
made electrical machines out of cardboard and sealing-wax, 
models of ships that wouldn't swim, and wooden clocks that 
wouldn't go. His famous and favourite feat, however, was 
borrowing sixpence of me, which he never gave back. I had 
a sister— she is dead, dear girl! — who wrote the neatest, 
prettiest hand that ever was seen, long, I am sure, before she 

could read, I have one of her books now, ' Lines to , 

Morning, Psalm C1X.' I don't know what I was famous for 
myself, beyond sore eyes, and an intense love for private 
•theatricals. This last attachment made, me useful. I was 
call-boy, under-prompt er, mob (behind the scenes), Sir 
Jeffery Hudson in the pie, one of the Children in the Wood, 
Prince Arthur, one of Hop-o'-my-Thumb's brothers, a demon, 
a fairy, a black foot-boy, and the ¥ellow Dwarf. I wonder I 
never turned actor in after-life : so devoted was I to the 
drama in those early days. 

Our theatre was the great front drawing-room at Yellow- 

* What an inestimable boon has the invention of photography been to 
heads of families whose younger branches are addicted to the study of 
chemistry. You cant well blow a house up with a camera obscura, iodine, 
collodion, and gallic acid, and you may produce a pretty portrait of some- 
body. 



374 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

knights, our stage, of course, the back drawing-room, the 
folding-doors making the proscenium. The dining-room was 
our favourite salle de spectacle ; but Hipkins; our host, fond 
as he was of private theatricals, was fonder still of his dinner, 
and was not to be cheated out of the enjoyment of his rare 
old port by the French windows looking out upon the lawn. 
I think Captain Chuff, Admiral Deadeyes (from the Priory), 
old Mr. Puffweazle the retired solicitor, and others of his 
port-wine friends, coincided in this view of matters : it was 
the more annoying to us, as the dining-room was garnished by 
two massive Corinthian pillars, and looked exactly like a real 
stage proscenium. 

We did the best with what we had though, the drawing- 
rooms, and famously with those. Crowded audiences we used 
to have in those cheerful apartments, deaf old ladies in the 
front row, groups of happy children everywhere, and a grin- 
ning background of servants — ' to see how Miss Louisa do take 
her part to be sure ! ■ I need not enter into a minute criti- 
cism of our performances. We played everything, tragedy, 
comedy, farce, burlesque, and opera (all the Miss Haweses 
played and sang). I am afraid I was not much of an actor 
myself — I was so small and weak ; but not to be egotistical, 
I imagine that I did once make something like a sensation as 
the physician's head in Za-ze-zi-zo-zu. 

I think if I had built coaches enough (mentally or bodily) 
to be very rich, that I should like to have a commodious 
family mansion, where my sons and daughters could play 
their private theatricals out. I am sure I would not grudge 
them the use of the dining-room, but would build a commo- 
dious summer-house on the lawn, where I could sip my old 
port wine. 



XXXIII. 

THE SPORTING WORLD. 



I take it for granted that you are not a ' sporting man.' I 
take it for granted that you own no race-horses, yachts, or 
ratting terriers ; that you have not ' backed the Slasher for a 
"fiver";' and that you 'have' nothing on any 'event.' I 
take it for granted that you are not prepared to bring forward 
a novice to run the Hampshire Stag ; that you are not one of 



THE SPORTING AVOELD. 375 

the contributors to the correspondents' column of ' Bell's Life/ 
anxiously awaiting a reply to your cribbage query last week, 
and feverish to know whether ' A. wins ;' and, lastly, that 
though you may have a sufficient zest for the amenities of 
social intercourse, you are not to be 'heard of at the bar of 
any sporting public-house, where you ' will be happy to see 
your friends. 5 

I propose to read ' Bell's Life ' — a very honestly and re- 
spectably conducted weekly paper — with you, but I do not 
propose to read it in that spirit. There are thousands who 
read it as what it is — a sporting print, giving reliable infor- 
mation on all sporting subjects. It is the chronicle of what 
is called the Sporting World. A human eye never asleep 
(nunquam dormio), and six columns of advertisements greet 
us in the front page. Instanter we become denizens if not 
habitues of the ^porting world. Have we horses ? — here are 
saddles, bridles, harness, harness-paste, unrivalled nosebands, 
inimitably rowelled spurs, and patent 'bits,' to counterfeit the 
marks appended to which is felony. Have we dogs ? — inven- 
tive tradesmen tempt us to purchase kennels, collars, dog- 
whips and specifics against the distemper and hydrophobia. 

We are invited to peruse works on the dog, works on the 
horse, works on the management and treatment of every 
animal of which man — having exhausted the use and employ- 
ment — has condescended to make the means or the end of the 
hydra-headed amusement known as ' sporting.' Foxes to 
replenish the hunting preserves, which by the too zealous 
ardour of their iSimrods have become denuded of their 
odoriferous vermin, are advertised in company with stud 
grooms who can bleed, sling and fire horses, and whippers-in 
who can be highly recommended. One gentleman wants 
twenty couple of deer to give a sylvan relish to the dells and 
glades of his park ; another has some prime ferrets to dispose 
of ' Well up to trap ;' a third wants to sell two bloodhounds ; 
a fourth to purchase some Cochin China fowls, and a real 
Javanese bantam or two. Then there is a Siberian wolf and 
her cubs to be sold — a bargain — by an amateur ' who has no 
further occasion for them ' (we should fancy not) ; and who, 
apparently puzzled as to whether they are ' sporting ' animals 
or not, and consequently entitled to the freedom of ' Bell's 
Life,' is perplexingly ambiguous in his description : hinting, 
at the commencement, that they would be ' suitable for a 
nobleman fond of zoology,' but subsiding, eventually, into a 



d7b GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

vague alternative, ' or would do for a menagerie.' They 
would be suitable there, I opine ; but are not exactly the sort 
of quadrupeds I should like to make drawing-room pets of, 
or to win in a raffle. 

Soon, however, a thoroughly sporting announcement comes 
blazoned forth in conspicuous type. ' To be sold at Tatter- 
sail's, nve-and-twenty couple and a half of fox-hounds, the 
property of a gentleman relinquishing hunting.' Good ; or 
has hunting relinquished the gentleman : which is it ? Shall 
I mind my own business and take the sale as a sale and 
nothing but a sale, or shall I be malicious and surmise that 
the gentleman has ridden, neck or nothing, after the five- and - 
twenty couple and a half of fox-hounds till he and they have 
clean outridden and lost scent of the fox, and have started 
another species of vermin called the * constable,' which pur- 
suing, the gentleman has managed to outrun, and has ended 
by riding ' over hounds ?' He has gone to the dogs, and his 
dogs have gone to Tattersall's. Who can this gentleman re- 
linquishing hunting be ? Not the Honourable Billy Buff, third 
son of Lord Kiffington of Baff Hall, Eowdyshire, surety. Not 
that gay scion of aristocracy — that frolicsome pilaster (if I 
may call him so) of the state — whilom of ten successive regi- 
ments of cavalry, all ' crack ' ones, out of which he was ten 
times moved to exchange or sell by ten successive colonels. 
Not Billy Buff, who was the worthy and emulous associate of 
the Earl of Mohawk, of Sir Wrench Nocker, Bart., and of that 
gay foreign spark, the Eussian Count Bellpulloff, who laid a 
wager of fifty to one with Lord Tommy Plantagenet (called 
' facer ' Plantagenet from his fondness for the ring), that he 
would, while returning from the Derby on the summit of a 
6 drag,' fish off four old ladies' false fronts by means of a salmon 
hook affixed to the end of a tandem whip within twenty 
minutes, but happening, just on turning the quarter, to hook 
a fierce butcher under the chin by mistake — lost his wager. 
The fifty was in five-pound notes, and Bellpulloff offered to 
make them peasants of the Ukraine (he had fifty thousand 
sheep and five thousand serfs on his paternal estate Tcharcshi- 
Bellpullofforgorod) if Tommy would bet again, but the ' facer r 
wouldn't. Not Billy Buff, the scourge and terror of the police, 
the Gordian knot and worse than sphynx-like enigma to sitting 
magistrates, the possessor of a museum in his chambers in 
Great Turk Street, consisting solely of purloined goods — 
articles of vice rather than of vertu : — fifty brass plates in- 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 377 

scribed with the name of Smith; a gamut of knockers on 
which he could play ' God save the Queen ;' miles of bell- 
wire : ill-gotten area railings like stands of spikes ; brewers' 
sign-boards — enough to set up fifty publicans ; good women 
without heads ; goldbeaters' naked arms brandishing their 
auriferous hammers fiercely, as though they would like to be 
at their ravisher ; glovers' stir! fingered hands, little dustpans, 
original teapots, golden canisters, pounds of candles, sugar- 
loaves, and scarlet cocked hats and Hessian boots, adorned 
moreover with gold, and of gigantic proportions. Not this 
Billy : the Billy who positively had two of his front teeth 
knocked out in order to be able to imitate a peculiar whistle 
he had heard among the refined denizens of Old Street, St. 
Luke's ; who made it his proud boast and self-glorification, 
that calling one morning on a friend who lived in an entresol 
in Eegent Street, and in a house otherwise occupied as a 
fashionable millinery establishment, he did then and there, in 
the absence of the fair workwomen at dinner, sit upon and 
utterly spoil and crush flat twenty-seven new bonnets, all 
ready trimmed, ordered, and wanted for the Chiswick Horti- 
cultural fete next day, whereby Mademoiselle Guipure (the 
millinery firm was Gimp, Guipure, and Gingham, and they 
went bankrupt last year) was driven to a state bordering on 
frenzy, and was only appeased by a cheque for a large amount. 
Yet Billy — this Billy — kept hounds, I know, and the old half- 
couple has a pleasant savour of his old familiar eccentricity. 
After that duel of his with Captain Trigghair of the Guards ; 
after the two consecutive fevers he caught at Pan in the 
Pyrenees ; and, notably, after that ugly wrestling-match in 
the coffee-room of Flimmer's Hotel, where Jack Langham 
(eight feet in height, and known as the ' baby ') threw him, 
whereby he cut his hand open, and got rather more of the 
sand off the floor and a splintered Champagne glass or two 
into the wound than was pleasant — Billy sowed his wild oats, 
sold his museum, and, marrying old Mrs. McMack (widow of 
General McMack, H.E.I.C.S., who died at Brighton of the 
modification of the East India Company's charter and an 
excess of curry), retired to Budgerow Park, near Godown, 
Dawkskire, fully determined to subside into a country gentle- 
man. We heard of him at first as exceedingly devoted to 
Mrs. McMack (late), whose five poodle-dogs he much delighted 
to array in martial attire, and to instruct in the manual exer- 
cise : indeed — there was a report in town that each poodle 



378 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

slept in a four-post bed, and that Billy went round for the 
candlesticks. But the Honourable Mrs. Buff (late McMack) 
took to sitting under the Eeverend Lachrymose Snivel, of St. 
Niobe's Chapel (belonging to the primitive AYeepers' connec- 
tion), an ecclesiastic of such a watery and tearful nature and 
aqueous of doctrine, that his ministry, combined with an over- 
zealous attachment to the abstinence-from-any-food-save-water- 
ruelon system, and the hydropathic system, prompting her, as 
did this latter, to the hankering after strange pumps, and 
taking long journeys in quest of artesian wells of extraordinary 
repute, eventually brought on dropsy, of which she died. 
Then Billy took to hunting his part of the country, and keep- 
ing hounds and the rest of it. I never had a day with him, 
for, goodness help me ! I ride like a tailor's goose ; but those 
who have ridden with the Dawkshire hounds, of which Billy 
was master, assure me that he did the thing in first-rate style ; 
that he had a kennel built for his hounds in the cinque-cento or 
renaissance style of architecture, which, coupled with the fact 
of the dogs very nearly eating a whipper-in one night, made 
Billy quite fashionable among the gentlemen of the country 
side. He it was also, I believe, who made that sublime re- 
sponse to an indignant farmer, who reproached him with 
riding through a turnip-field, on the ground that it was always 
customary to 'ware turnips — to whom says Billy, ' How the 
deuce was I to know they were turnips, unless you stuck a 
boiled leg of mutton in the middle of 'em ?' But, alas ! I 
heard one day that Billy had been ' carrying on shameful ;' 
next, that he was ' shaky ;' next, that he was ' wanted ;' finally, 
that he was ' done up ;' and now who shall say that my sur- 
mise is chimerical, if I conjecture that the five-and-twenty 
couple and a half of fox-hounds, to be sold at Tattersali's, 
might once have formed the pack of the Honourable Billy 
Buff, Lord Eiffington's third son ? 

Poor Billy Buff! sorrowful, sold-up scion of aristocracy, 
where art thou now, I wonder? Hast thou gone down to 
to the cities of refuge that are in Belgium ? — to sly little Spa, 
nestling among quasi-Prussian trees ; to ' pale Brussels ;' or 
gaunt, grim, silent Ghent? Or art thou at Kissingen, or 
Wiesbaden, or Aix, making wry faces at some ill-smelling, 
rusty-keys-tasting brunnen ; or at Homburg, pricking on a 
limp printed card how many times rouge has turned up ; or 
at Boulogne, wistfully peering at the white cliffs of Albion 
through a telescope ; or at the prison of Clichy in Paris, 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 3/9 

otherwise known as the Hotel des Haricots ; or art thou lan- 
guishing at the suit of a Gasthof-'kee^er in the Const abler v:ard 
of some petty German principality ? Certain I am, that if in 
this country, thou wilt never be at Tattersall's to see thy 
hounds sold. The memories would come rushing over thee ; 
it would be too much for thee to contemplate Flora and 
Hector, that ran so evenly together, and that carried their 
tails so bravely parallel, that, at a side view, they looked like 
one dog. Nor unmoved could st thou view Blucher, the deep- 
mouthed hound, and Sandy, the old liver-patched fellow that 
knew every move on Eeynard's board, and the half couple — 
that young dog that would give tongue, for all a fierce whip- 
per-in nearly cut the dumb brute in two with his double thong. 
Ah ! ' the southerly winds and the cloudy skies ' that pro- 
claimed thy hunting mornings : where are they now? Where 
are the gay young bucks from London, with bran-new scarlet 
and leathers, the chefs d'cBuvres of Xugee, or Crellin, or Buck- 
master : the lads that took the astonishing leaps o'er hedges, 
and ditches, and stone walls, when bright eyes were looking 
at them, and went round by gates and gaps, like sensible 
fellows, when bright eyes were somewhere else ? They are 
gone like the smoke of the cigars they puffed as they rode to 
cover ; like the mighty breakfasts they consumed at Budgerow 
House at thy expense ; like the mightier dinners and libations 
they achieved at ditto ditto, when the chase was over, and the 
fox was caught. Who will realise tableaux vivants of Luke 
Clennell's picture of a hunting dinner now? — who will preside 
at joyous banquets in thy great dining-room, and stir up 
the punch-bowl (nasty fellow !) with the fox's brush, and 
give ; Tom Moody,' and fall first beneath the table among 
black bottles and unsteady top-boots ? The ancient hunts- 
man has transferred his stained scarlet frock and grog- 
blossomed countenance to another master ; they are going to 
build an Agapeinone, or a Sanatorium, or a Puseyite convent 
on the ruins of thy renaissance kennel ; the veiy ragged boy 
that followed barefoot, in his torn red jacket, thy hounds, and 
begged for coppers because he was in at the death ; the pepper- 
and-salt farmer, who began by swearing at the fox and then 
mounted his cob and followed it ; the parson on his big brown 
horse ; the staring red-haired children ; the old dames that 
hobbled out from cottages ; the bumpkins with heads of hair 
that looked like thatch, who put their hands beside their 
mouths, and yelled a rustic Tallyho ! as the hunt swept by : — 



380 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

where are they now? Ichabod, Ichabod— enough. We have 
all been sold up more or less, at some time or another. We 
have all been bankrupt, or insolvent, or have compounded 
with our creditors, in friendship, love, hopes, ambition, truth. 
Some of us, too, have paid but little, very little, in the pound. 
From dogs to horses. Tattersall's again ; but this time the 
spirited auctioneers leave but little room to surmise. Thir- 
teen racers to be sold. All from irreproachable dams and 
by aristocratic sires. The Beauty, by Candlebox, out of 
Sophronisba, brother to Columbine, sire to Ehodomontade, to 
be sold by auction : with all his engagements. With him 
are other horses and mares, all of equally illustrious descent. 
Some have won plates in canters, and others cups in hand- 
gallops, and others again have walked over the course for 
purses full of sovereigns. All are to be sold : with their en- 
gagements. It does not require vision quite as acute as that 
necessary for seeing through a millstone to discern who the 
gentleman going abroad is. I think Sir Gybbe Eoarer knows 
him : Sir G. Eoarer, Bart., whose horse, Eamoneur, won the 
Sootybridge sweepstakes. Sir G-. E., Bart., whose filly, 
Spagnoletta, was scratched just before the St. Eowels, last 
year. The same Baronet who started Polly for the Pine- 
apple stakes, and is supposed to have given Jack Bellyband, 
his jockey, instructions not to win, he having laid against 
himself considerably ; but Jack having drunk too much 
champagne, forgot himself and did win, to the Baronet's 
wrath and consternation. Sir G. E. had a share in the horse 
which started for — what was it ? — the Bumblebury Cup, 
entered under a certain name — was it Theodosius ? — and as 
of a certain age, but which was subsequently discovered to 
be a horse called Toby, two years older. Can Sir Gybbe 
Eoarer, Bart., be the gentleman who is going abroad? I 
think he is. He is always going abroad, and selling his 
horses and buying fresh ones : with their engagements. He 
stands to win a pretty sum on the next French steeple- 
chase : I hope he may get it. Sir Gybbe Eoarer dresses very 
like his groom, and has a hoarse voice and an intensely shiny 
hat. When he wins he treats everybody with champagne, 
beggars included, and throws red-hot halfpence out of hotel 
windows ; when he loses, he horsewhips his servants and 
swears. There is but one book to him in the world, — his 
betting-book, for he wants no Eacing Calendar ; he is that in 
himself. He has a penchant for yachting sometimes, between 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 381 

Ascot and the Leger. His yacht is called the Handicap. 
Will he ever go to the Levant in her, I wonder ? 

Supposing that, looking at ' Bell's Life ' as you and I do — 
not as a mere chronicle of sporting occurrences, a calendar for 
reference and information, but as a curiously accurate, though 
perhaps unconscious mirror of what, from the amusement of 
the mass of the people, has come to be the engrossing busi- 
ness and occupation of a very considerable section of that 
people, — we ponder a moment over Sir Gybbe Eoarer's race- 
horses, stepping-down in the spirit, if you like, to Tattersall's 
yard, where they are to be sold. 

Here they are, slender symmetrical creatures with satin 
coats, with trim and polished hoofs, with plaited manes, with 
tails so neatly cropped that not one hair is longer than 
another. Full of blood, full of bone, full of mettle and action, 
almost supernaturally speedy of foot, patient, brave, and 
generous in spirit : high-mettled racers, in fact. Kow, to 
what cunning knave can it first have occurred to build on 
these beautiful, generous animals a superstructure of fraud 
and knavery, and low chicanery ? Why should a horse be 
used as the corner-stone of the Temple of Eoguery ? And 
why, more than this, should these few stone-weight of horse- 
flesh be capable of producing the mighty effects they do upon 
the manners and morals of a great nation ? The Beauty, 
Sophronisba, Columbine : they are not war-horses ; their 
necks are not clothed with thunder ; they say not among the 
captains, 'Ha! ha!' — yet, on them has hung, and will hang 
again, the lives and fortunes, not of scores but of hundreds, 
not; of hundreds, but of thousands and tens of thousands. A 
wrinkle in the satin coat of Sophronisba ; a pail of water in- 
advertently or maliciously administered to Columbine ; an ill- 
hammered nail in Ehodomontade's shoe ; these are sufficient 
to send clerks and shop-boys to the hulks, to bring happy 
households to beggary and shame, and solid mercantile firms 
down by the run. Sophronisba, Columbine, Ehodomontade. 
though they know it not, have swallowed up the patrimony of 
widows and orphans: on their speed or tardiness depend 
tedious law-suits ; interminable mazes of litigation in Chancery 
can be unravelled by their hoofs. They are powerful — all 
unconsciously— for more good and evil than ever was stowed 
away in all Pandora's box. If Sophronisba runs for the 
Cup, Charley Lyle will marry the heiress. If Columbine is 
scratched for the Trebor Handicap, young Bob Sabbertash 



382 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

must sell his commission in the Twenty-sixth Hussars. Stars 
and garters, wealth and honours, life and death, hang on the 
blind flat of these horses. 

And this is ' Bell's Life ' (called in the sporting world ' The 
Life '), and this is man's life, too ! 

Great things are wrought from small beginnings, and 
mighty edifices stand upon comparatively slender founda- 
tions. According to Hindoo theology, the world stands on 
an elephant's back — which again stands on a tortoise ; though 
what that stands on is not yet decided by the learned Pundits 
of the unchanging East. So, on the slender fetlocks and 
pasterns of these bay and chesnut horses in Tattersall's sale- 
yard are erected the Great National festivals of the English 
people — the acknowledged British holidays : holidays for the 
due and catholic enjoyment of which grave legislative bodies 
suspend their sittings, dinner-parties of the loftiest and most 
solemn haut ton are postponed, and courtly this dansantes put 
off. There was a professor of music I knew who was ruined 
through having fixed his morning concert to take place on the 
Derby Day. 

The Derby Day ! who would think these quiet, meek-eyed 
scions of the hippie race were the alls-in-all, the cynosures, 
the alphas and omegas of that momentous day ? Yet so they 
are. Closely shrouded in checked or gaily-bordered horse- 
cloths — as jealously veiled from the prying public eye as w r as 
ever favourite Odalisque of Osmanli Pacha of three tails as on 
Sunday morning they take their long-expected, much-talked- 
of gallops — jealous and anxious eyes watch their every move- 
ment ; a falter is eagerly foreshadowed as the forerunner of a 
* scratch/ a stumble as the inevitable precursor of a string- 
halt, an over-vigorous whinny impetuously translated as a 
cold, fatal to next Wednesday's start. Eeaders of ' Bell's 
Life/ how you pluck at your long waistcoats ; how you twitch 
at the brims of your low-crowned hats ; how many entries 
and re-entries, and erasures and pencil-smudgings are made 
in those note-books of yours, with the patent metallic leaves 
and the everlasting pencils and all on the ups and downs, the 
on-goings and short-comings of these unconscious four-legged 
creatures. Early on the Wednesday morning, Newman and 
Quartermaine's retainers are as busy as hives of bees multi- 
plied by infinity. Pails of water — resembling (in an inverse 
degree) the casks of the Danaides, inasmuch as they are always 
being emptied, and are never empty — dash refreshing streams 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 383 

against wheels numerous enough, to furnish, it would seem, 
clock-work for the world. Strange barouches, unheard-of 
britzkas, phaetons that should properly have been sequestrated 
in the Greenyard of oblivion, or broken up in the coach fac- 
tory of forgetfulness long since, suddenly start up from remote 
coach-houses : their wheels screaming horribly ; their boxes 
anxious for the accommodating man who ' does not mind sitting 
there the least in the world,' and who always manages to get 
more champagne than anybody else ; their boots panting for 
hampers of choice provisions, always securely tied up, and 
always dropping sprinklings of lobster salad and raised pie 
on the road in the ' Hop-o'my-thumb ' manner — mad, in a 
word, to be down to the Derby, and to run their poles through 
adverse carriage panels. Small, weazen, silver-haired men 
who have vegetated during the winter in ' watering-houses,' 
and down strawy mews, where the coachmen's wives live, 
who take in washing, and the fifth footman dwells over the 
harness-room when he's out of place — these patriarchs of the 
saddle emerge in a weird and elf-like manner from stable- 
doors : their rheumatism-bowed frames swathed in crimson 
silk jackets, white cords on their shrunken legs, gamboge tops 
on their spindle-shanks, and great, white, fluffy hats, a world 
too large for them, on their poor bald heads — calling them- 
selves, save us, Postboys — cracking their knotty whips with 
senile valour, and calling to Jim to c let his head go,' and to 
Tom to ' take a squint at the mare's off foot.' And they get 
into the saddle, these rare old boys ! And they hold up their 
whips warningly to their fellow boys when there is a ' dead 
lock ' between Oheam and Sutton ; and they untie hampers, 
and eat pies innumerable, and get very drunk indeed ; yet 
drive home safely, and return the 'chaff' measured out to 
them with interest. 

The Derby Day ; do I require the limits of this paper to 
describe it thoroughly ? Say, rather, a volume — say, rather, 
the space occupied by the ' Encyclopaedia Britannica,' or Mr. 
Alison's ' History of Europe.' The rushing, roaring, riving, 
rending, raving railway station full of the million of pas- 
sengers, who, taking first-class tickets, are glad to leap into 
third-class carriages ; the fifty thousand, who, wishing to go 
to Epsom, are compulsorily conveyed (howling the while) to 
Brighton or Dover instead. The twenty thousand that say 
that it is a shame and that they will write to the ' Times,' 
ogether with the ten thousand that do write, and don't get 



384 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

their letters inserted. The hundreds that lose their handker- 
chiefs, watches, and temper. The two or three benign men 
who haven't anything on the race, and say that really, all 
things considered, the Company have done as well as could 
reasonably be expected for the public — as if any one expected 
anything in reason on the Derby Day ! The road with the 
solemn drags full of, and surmounted by, solemn guardsmen — 
hearses of the Household Cavalry. The open carriages, close 
carriages, chaises, carts, omnibusses, stage coaches full of 
familiar faces. Everybody there, on the rail and on the road, 
on the Derby Day. The House of Lords, and the House of 
Commons, the Bar, the Bench, the Army, the Navy, and the 
Desk ; May Fair and Eag Fair, Park Lane and Petticoat Lane, 
the Chapel Eoyal and Whitechapel, Saint James's and Saint 
Giles's. Give me a pen plucked from the wing of a roc (the 
most gigantic bird known, I think) ; give me a scroll of 
papyrus as long as the documents in a Chancery suit ; give 
me a river for an ink-bottle, and then I should be scant of 
space to describe the road that leads to the course, the hill, the 
grand stand, the gipsies, the Ethiopian serenaders, the clouds 
of horsemen, like Bedouins of the desert, flying towards 
Tattenham Corner ; the correct cards that never are correct ; 
the dog that always gets on the course and never can get off 
again, and that creates as much amusement in his agony as 
though he had been Mr. Merryman. The all-absorbing, 
thrilling, soul-riveting race. The ' Now they're off!' 'Now 
they're coming round!' 'Here they come!' 'Black cap!' 
1 Blue cap !' ' Green Jacket !' ' Eed jacket !' ' Eed jacket it 
is, hurrah !' followed by the magic numbers at the grand 
stand, the flight of the pigeons, and the changing of hands of 
unnumbered thousand pounds. The throwing at the sticks. 
The chickens, the salads, the fillings of young bodies with old 
wine, the repasts on wheels, and hobnobbings over splinter- 
bars. The broken glasses, cracked heads, rumpled bonnets, 
flushed faces. The road home ! The Cock at Sutton, and a 
' quiet ' cup of tea there. The chaffing, the abuse, the indict- 
able language. The satirical crowd on Kennington Common. 
The Derby Day, in a word : and all for what ? Where are the 
causes to these most mighty effects. Look around, student of 
6 Bell's Life,' and see them in the slender race-horses, the stud 
of a gentleman going abroad, to be sold without reserve. 

Change we the theme, for of horseflesh you must have had 
more than enough. Else, had I space besides and time, I 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 385 

would touch upon thefatidici vati, the sporting prophets, already 
touched upon elsewhere. Else, should you hear strange stories 
of stables, and nobbled horses, and rare feats of jockey- 
ship. Else, would I introduce you, 'Bell's Life' reading 
neophyte, to one of these same jockeys, a weary, haggard, 
slouching little man, all mummified in baggy great-coats, and 
drinking brandy and water tremulously — a very different 
spectacle from the trim, natty, spruce little jock, with the 
snowy leathers and the lustrous tops and the rainbow jacket, 
who is in earnest confab with his owner before the race ; or, 
after it, and after winning, is cheered enthusiastically up and 
down the course, or who leans indolently over the balcony of 
the Grand Stand, flacking his horsewhip to shake hands with 
lords. But ' Bell's Life,' my friend, has as many phases as 
human life has, and we must hurry to another. 

The Eing ! Eights to come ! Not many, thank Heaven — 
thank reading, writing, and arithmetic ; and yet, one, two, 
three columns are devoted to the Eing. Jack Nimmo and the 
Grotto Passage Pet, for fifty pounds a side. The Nottingham 
Bruiser and Bandy Starling, at catch weight, for ten pounds a 
side. Tom Knucldes will fight Ned Lumsden (the Butcher) 
for twenty pounds, and his money is ready at Mr. Fibbs's, the 
Knowledge Box, Chancery Lane. Toby Nutts, of Birmingham, 
is surprised that the Sheffield Toddler has not made good the 
last deposit ; he is to be heard of at the Bunch of Fives, 
Eampant Horse Street, Norwich. Tass Cokerconk writes to 
correct an error that has crept into your valuable paper, as I 
did not strike foul, and being at present out of town (Tass is 
wanted for a little matter of hocussing and card-sharping), and 
so on. We are delighted to see that our old friend, Frisky 
Wappem, is to be found every other evening at Jemmy Crab's, 
the Leg of Mutton Fist, Bell Alley, where he gives lessons in 
the noble art of self-defence to noblemen and gentlemen. N.B. 
Gloves provided. Sparring by the pick of the fancy; and 
every alternate evening devoted to harmony by first-rate pro- 
fessionals. 

I take it for granted that you have never seen a prize fight. 
I hope you never will ; yet, conscientiously pelligrinising as 
we are through 'Bell's Life,' I don't think I shall be wrong in 
showing you one, in the spirit — as a scarecrow and an example. 

The ^ fight between Lurky Snaggs and Dan Pepper — the 
Kiddy. A steam-boat — ' The Pride of the Eiver' — has been 
chartered for the momentous occasion, for the fight is to take 

2 c 



386 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

place at some — to the uninitiated — carefully-concealed place 
on the Kent or Essex shore. A trip by rail was at first con- 
templated : a railway company, with an ardour and enthusiasm 
for the P. E. which did them honour, having offered handsome 
terms and every accommodation in the way of special trains ; 
but old Sol Abrams, the Nestor of the Ping, reminded the 
promoters of the cheerful exhibition that a county magistrate, 
determined to stop the fight, might balk their battle-ground 
from station to station, and send for reinforcements of ' bobbies,' 
or policemen, by the great tale-teller, the electric telegraph. 
So the river was decided on. The steamer has been freighted 
with bottled stout, wines, spirits, cigars, captains' biscuits, and 
sandwiches ; and, at an early hour, she receives a motley bevy 
of passengers — all, however, respectable in the Thurtellian or 
gig-keeping sense of respectability, for they have all paid a 
guinea for their voyage and back. Several nobs, several first- 
rate men, several City men — all peculiar and distinct varieties 
of the genus sporting man, but on which I cannot stay to 
descant now — are present ; and I am compelled to acknowledge 
the presence of many, very many of the gentlemen we met last 
night — the chained and ringed dandies — the bucks who know 
where Brixton is, and who sits at Bow Street on Monday 
mornings. Take care of your pockets, oh ! my young student 

of ' Bell's Life/ for, of all the out-and-out thieves 

There are some temporary difficulties, occupying, indeed, 
a considerable portion of the forenoon, before a battle-ground 
can be finally selected. In one parish a fierce county 
magistrate sallies forth against the Fancy, with the whole of 
the posse comitatus he has been able to muster at his heels ; in 
another, a detachment of the rural police puts them to rout, 
with the loss of a considerable portion of their baggage. At 
last, a sweet little slip of waste land, skirted on one side by a 
towing-path and on the other by a brickfield, is selected, and 
possession taken, without molestation. There is a slight dis- 
turbance at first with a drunken horse-chaunter and a sporting 
blacksmith, who persist in offering to fight Snaggs and Pepper 
themselves for any number of pots of ale. These, however, 
are speedily disposed of — the horse-chaunter by being settled 
off-hand by three facers and a crack under the left ear, and sent 
home in a cart with his bloody sconce wrapped round with 
one of the staring shawls ; the blacksmith by being tilted into 
a wet ditch, and left to get sober at his leisure. Then, 
business begins in right earnest. Sundry vans, omnibuses, 



THE SPORTING WORLD. 3S7 

and knowing-looking livery-stable breaks have been following 
the course of the steamboat down the river ; together with a 
locust crowd of chaise-carts, dog-carts, Hansom cabs, and a 
few private cabriolets — one with the smallest tiger and the 
largest gray mare to be found probably in England, and con- 
taining the ^Maecenas of the Ring, rather pink about the eyes, 
and yellow about the cheek-bones from last night s champagne. 
An amateur trotting-match or two has been got up on the 
road, and Jack Cowcabbidge, the nobby greengrocer, of the 
Old Kent Eoad, has broken the knees of Handsome Charley's 
mare Peppermint, for which Charley swears that he will ■ pull 
him.' All these vehicles cluster together in a widish outer 
ring, having sundry scouts or videttes posted, to give notice of 
the approach of inimical forces ; and, in addition, there are 
several horsemen, hovering on the skirts of the ring, well- 
mounted gentlemen in garb, and apparently half interested 
and delighted with the prospect of the sport, and half ashamed 
to be seen in such company. Old Squire Nobsticks, of 
Nobstick Hall, close by, has come in spite of his gout in a 
roomy velocipede, and navigates into the inner ring amid the 
cheers of the Fancy. He never misses a fight. This inner 
ring I speak of is now formed. The stakes are firmly driven 
into the turf, the ropes passed through circular orifices in their 
tops, and all made snug and comfortable. Now, Monsieur 
Tyro, if you please, button up all your pockets, and essay not 
to enter the inner ring, for the swell mobsmen will stone you 
from it if you do, and hustle and rifle you as you come out. 
Stand on the top of this hackney cab, and you will be enabled 
to view the proceedings with greater ease and comfort. Kong 
but the veterans of the Fancy and the Msecenasses (?) of the 
Ring have the privilege of sitting on the grass close to the 
ropes. 

* 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view/ 

The heroes peel, and , divesting themselves of the grubby or 
chrysalis-like covering of great-coats and wrap-rascals, appear 
in the bright butterfly bravery of denuded torsos, white 
drawers and stockings, flaring waist-handkerchiefs and sparrow- 
bill shoes. We have no time to ponder on the magnificent 
muscular development of these men's chests and arms. The 
bottleholders are at their respective corners, with their bottles 
and sponges; the referee stands watch in hand (I hope he 
will not lose it ere the fight be done); the swell mobsmen 

2 c 2 



338 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

make a desperate rush at anything they can lay hands on; 
and these two men proceed to ponnd each other's bodies. 

I could describe the scene that follows, but cui bono ? 
Content yourself with fancying who first drew claret ; how 
often the referee cried time : who got down whom at the 
ropes ; who put out cleverly with his left ; w r hose face bore 
severe marks of punishment, hit out wildly, hung like a mass 
of butcher's meat on his second's knee ; and, failing at last to 
come up to time, fell down senseless on the turf, caused the 
sponge to be thrown up, and victory to be declared for his 
opponent. What need is there for me to state who officiated 
for Snaggs, and who did the needful for the Kiddy ; how there 
was a savage foray on this latter's party by the Nottingham 
Soughs ; how there was a cry of - Foul !' and how the swell 
mobsmen robbed right and left, hitting wildly meanwhile, till 
the Maecenas of the Eing — fleeing from before them — fell into 
the ditch a-top of the tinker, and had an after-fight or fancy 
epilogue with him ? We have had enough of it. 

And I am not half through ' Bell's Life ' yet, though you 
must be as weary of it and of me as ever was Mariana in the 
Moated Grange. But, as I said before, ' Bell's Life ' is as the 
life of man, and how am I to despatch so important a subject 
in a dozen columns ? Come we, however, to close quarters, 
and make an end on't. 

There is the column devoted to pedestrianism — including 
walking, running, and leaping matches. Tyros as we may be 
in sporting matters, there are few of us but have occasionally 
met an individual in short cotton drawers and a linen jacket, 
with a printed handkerchief twisted round his head, after the 
manner of the French poissardes, walking manfully along a 
suburban turnpike road ; his left arm kept on a level with his 
sternum, or breast bone, and his right hand clutching a short 
stick — walking for a wager. Or who has not seen the bold 
runner, skimming along the Queen's highway, with nimble 
legs and a stern and unmoved countenance, amid the clamours 
of riff-raff boys and the cheers of his supporters. 

And fishing : fly, salmon, and jack ? And wrestling ? And 
* cocking ' (hid slily in an out-of-the-way corner, but existing 
and practised for all that). And quoits, and bowls? And 
cricket ? And aquatics (yachting and sculling) ? And change- 
ringing ? And the mysterious game of Nurr and spell, goff, 
skating, hockey, quarter-staff, single-stick, fencing, dog-fancy- 
ing, pigeon - shooting, sparrow - shooting, archery, chess, 



THE SPORTING WOBLD. 389 

draughts, billiards, ratting, otter-hunting? Have I nothing 
to say on all these subjects ? I have, indeed, and to spare ; 
but, knowing that I could never finish were I once to begin. 
I will eschew the temptation and say nothing. These are 
bound up with us, these sports and pastimes — they are bone 
of our bone, and flesh of our flesh — they are crackling cinders 
at almost every Englishman's fireside. 

One word, and an end. Of the phases of sporting life I have 
endeavoured to delineate, all offer some repulsive and humilia- 
ting traits. In these feeble sketches of some of the sports and 
pastimes of some of the English people, I have been compelled 
to bring into my canvas degraded human beings — to delineate 
base passions and appetites — to become the limner and 
biographer of scoundrels and dens. It may appear to some 
that I have been incoherent and fantastical — that I have 
sinned, like the painter in Horace, by joining horses' necks to 
human heads, 

-and wildly spread 



The various plumage of the feather' d kind 
O'er limbs of different beasts absurdly joiued.' 

Yet those who know the section of the world I have touched 
upon, know too. and will acknowledge, that to all the manly 
English sports that find a record in ' Bell's Life ' — round all 
these fine sturdy oaks with their broad chests and brawny 
arms— there are obscene parasites and creepers of chicanery, 
roguery, and ruffian blackguardism — dead leaves of low gamb- 
ling and vulgar debauchery — rotten limbs of intemperance, 
knavery, and violence. The potato fields of English sports 
are afflicted with something worse than a potato blight, an 
insect more deadly than the aphis vastator : by the betting 
blight : the foul scorpion of betting-shops, and racing-sweeps, 
and public-house tossing-matches. 

I hope I have not said a word in ridicule or deprecation of 
the athletic sports of England — the sports that send our lads 
(from Eton to charity schools) forth to do yeomen's service all 
over the globe. Nor can I end this Paper without recognising 
the hopeful good that education, steam, cheap printing, cheap 
pictures, and cheap schools have done towards discouraging 
and discountenancing that brutal and savage wantonness in 
our sports, which was, until very lately, a scandal and dis- 
grace to us as a nation. Every Englishman who numbers 
more than forty summers, can remember what formed the 



390 GASLIGHT AJTD DAYLIGHT. 

staple objects of amusement among the people in his youth. 
Bull-baiting, bear-baiting, duck-hunting, floating a cat in a 
bowl pursued by dogs; fastening two cats together by their tails, 
and then swinging them across a horizontal pole to see which 
should first kill the other ; tying a cat and an owl together 
and throwing them into the water to fight it out ; cock-fight- 
ing (before lords in drawing-rooms, sometimes — the birds 
being provided with silver spurs) ; ratting ; and, as a climax 
of filthy savagery, worrying matches by men against bull-dogs, 
the man being on his knees having his hands tied behind him ! 
These sports, thank Heaven ! are nearly extinct among us, and 
though, from time to time, we hear of brutes indulging in 
nooks and corners in such miscalled sports, we look at them 
as ruffianly anachronisms, post-dated vagabonds who should 
have lived in the days when the Soman ladies made it a sport 
to thrust golden pins into the flesh of their female slaves, or 
when it was the pastime of the British people, from the sabbath 
before Palm Sunday to the . last hour of the Tuesday before 
Easter, to stone and beat Jews. Yet we are not quite spotless 
in our sports, yet. 



XXXIY. 

WHERE AEE THEY? 



I have no desire to trench on the province or interfere with 
the circulation of the numerous compendious little works, the 
authors of which are so desirous to know "Who's Who ? What's 
What ? or Which is Which ? in eighteen hundred and fifty- 
three, four, five, or nine. I hope that the result of their 
inquiries will be eminently satisfactory to them ; and that 
they will allow me to confine myself to the speculative query, 
* Where are they ?' 

Yes ; where are they ? ■ Whom T you may ask. I answer 
— People. People who do and are doing the most extra- 
ordinary things around us daily and hourly; but with whom, 
our whole life long, we seem forbidden to come in contact, 
and regarding whose whereabouts we must needs be per- 
petually perplexed. They must be somewhere, these People, 
yet we never saw them, never shall see them, perhaps ; we 
may have sate next them at dinner yesterday, ridden in the 
same omnibus, occupied the next seat in ih.e pit, the same pew 
at church, jostled against them in the City, five minutes ago, 



WHERE AEE THEY? 39:! 

yet we are no wiser, and must ramble up and down the world 
till our span be accomplished, and our ramblings ended, still 
bootlessly repealing the query, i Where are they ?' 

A chief cause for our distressing uncertainty as to where 
the people we are in search of are to be found, lies in the dis- 
agreeable uniformity of costume prevalent in the present day. 
We are worse off than were we placed as observers in some 
savage country where the inhabitants wore no clothes at all : 
for there, at least, the Chief might be recognised by the extra 
quantity of paint he adorned himself with ; and we might in 
time become sufficiently initiated in the mysteries of tattoo to 
tell the Medicine man from the Peon, the young Warrior from 
the Old Brave. But may I ask how are we to tell any one man 
from another (our own immediate acquaintances excepted) by 
his dress alone. The millionnaire may be walking past us in 
an intense state of shabbiness, and the spendthrift may hustle 
us half into the gutter in all the bra- very of ' heavy-swelldom, 5 
cane and jewellery. There is a Judge, I have heard, who 
dresses like the frequenter of race-courses : I have had pointed 
out to me a Peer of the Eealm whom I should have taken for 
a waiter at a City chop-house ; and I know an actor — a very 
humorous and jocular comedian indeed — who looks like a 
professed member of the Society of Jesuits. Beally, what 
with the moustache movement, the beard movement, the 
detective police, the cheap clothing establishments, the shirt- 
collar mania, the introduction and wearing, by peaceful 
business every-day men T of the wildest, and most incon- 
gruously picturesque garments — such as ponchos, togas, vi- 
cunas, siphonias. Inverness wrappers, &c. — nobody knows 
who or what anybody else is : and the father may go searching 
for his children, and the child for his parent, and the wife for 
her husband, all echoing and re-echoing, like Montaigne with 
his Que-sais-je ? — the one frivolous and vexatious, yet re- 
condite interrogation, ; Where are they?' 

Of course the public enunciation of this demand will lead 
to the reception of some tons of letters by Messrs. Chapman 
and Hall, from parties anxious to give full information of 
; where ' they are. They will be astonished that 1 have been 
so long ignorant of their whereabouts : and my ' Where are 
they V will be quite swamped and put to shame by a chorus of 
' We are here : we are there ; we are everywhere/ None 
will abstain from communicating their local habitations and 
names save those who have some strong private and personal 



392 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

reasons for keeping it a dead secret, where they are at all. 
Meanwhile, pending the communicativeness of the one class, 
and the reticence of the other, where are they all, neverthe- 
less ? 

AVhere, for instance, are the vast majority of the advertisers 
and the people that are advertised for ? and, more than that, 
what sort of people can they be ? The ' Times ' is full of such 
subjects for speculation ; and I dare say the clerks who receive 
the advertisements themselves, and the compositors who set 
them up, and the press-readers who revise them, often pause 
in the midst of their task to wonder where the seekers and 
the sought may be. Where is the ' gentleman who witnessed 
the brutal assault ' on the other gentleman getting out of a 
Chelsea omnibus on Tuesday the twenty-second instant, and 
who would confer an inestimable favour if he would look in at 
No. 3, Muggleston Street, Pimlico ? Will he ever confer this 
inestimable favour, this gentleman ? Alas, we may search the 
reports of the police courts and the Middlesex Sessions for 
months, years, and find no sign of him ! The assaulter and 
the assaulted, the lawyers and the witnesses, may all have 
settled their little business long since. Lawyers may have- 
been instructed, and they in their turn may have instructed 
counsel, costs may have been incurred, charged, taxed, paid, 
not paid, sued for; the aggrieved party may at this very 
moment be expiating his rash desire to obtain justice, in 
Whitecross Street or the Queen's Bench; the villain who 
committed the gross assault may be coolly puffing his cigar 
on the deck of the ' Lively Dolphin,' bound for Melbourne ; the 
gentleman who witnessed the affray may be (without the 
slightest cognizance of the other's propinquity) sailing with 
him on the salt sea, or in another ship on the same sea y 
twin cherries on one stalk of coral for a shark to gnaw, or 
lying near him at the bottom of the sea itself; the lawyers 
may be dead, their daughters dowered with, or their sons 
spending, the Costs ; the Pimlico omnibus may be broken to 
pieces or burnt, or we may be hailing it at this very moment. 
The affair may have taken all, or any, or none of these turns. 
How do we know ? what do we know ? Nothing ! And we 
have not even a definite knowledge of ' nothing ' — nothingness 

— the neant even. What is nothing ? Is it not a ? but soft. 

Where is the party who called on Messrs. Buggies and 
Fuggles in the course of last September, and who is requested 
to call again ? What did he call for ? Was it to tell Buggies- 



WHERE ARE THEY? o93 

that lie was his long-lost son, supposed to have gone down 
with all hands on board the ' Chowder-Ally,' outward-bound 
East Indiaman, twenty years ago ? Was it to ask Euggles and 
Fuggles if they had heard anything of his (whose ?) long-lost 
daughter, supposed to have gone down with all hands in the 
k Mango,' homeward-bound West-Indiaman, ten years since? 
Was it merely to pull Buggles's nose or to call Fuggles a liar ; 
and do Euggles and Fuggles desire to see him again in order 
to serve him with a notice of action, or to confess that they 
were in the wrong, and tender him the hand of reconciliation ; 
or to ask him to dinner, commend a poisoned chalice to his 
lips, present him with a service of plate, or smite him beneath 
the fifth rib ? Where is he, finally ? Eeading the ' Times ' at 
this very moment, perhaps, and in his anxiety to learn the 
latest news from the East, deliberately skipping the advertise- 
ments ; troubled with a short memory, maybe, and with the 
paragraph beneath his eyes, quite forgetting Euggles and 
Fuggles's names, and that he ever called on them at all ; or, 
fully mindful of his September visit, but determined to see 
Euggles and friend at Jeddo, in Japan, before he trusts himself 
within twenty miles of their house again. Perhaps, my dear 
reader, you may be the party who called, and when this meets 
your eye, will rush off to Buggles's incontinent, or to Peele's 
Coffee-house, to consult the files of the ' Times ' for the date of 
the advertisement — or without a moment's delay, will proceed 
to put the breadth of the British Channel — nay, the Atlantic 
— nay, the Southern Pacific Ocean — between Euggles, Fuggles r 
and yourself. 

Where are the ' descendants (if any) of Jean Baptiste 
Pierre Jouvin, who was supposed to have been a French 
Huguenot refugee in London, about the year sixteen hun- 
dred and eighty?' Wherever can the individual be, who 
seeks to find out descendants from so remote a stock? Is 
he Methusaleh, Sir Barnard Burke, the wandering Jew, 
Isaac Laquedem, or the laborious historian of the Bevo- 
cation of the Edict of Xantes seeking to verify some docu- 
ment, to elicit some fact, to authenticate some date? Or is 
there perchance some Jouvin yet alive, a Protestant and a 
Frenchman, anxious to learn tidings of his old Huguenot 
ancestor — a rich Jouvin, a pious Jouvin, a kindly Jouvin, 
yearning to share his riches and his love with some one bear- 
ing his name, and descended from the race that suffered p r ix> 
Fide in the bad days of old ? Or does the advertisement 



39i GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

emanate—dreadful thought !— from some wily Jesuit, or fierce 
Inquisitor's great grandson cherishing ancestral bigotry and 
traditional hatred — actuated by fanatical hostility towards 
Huguenotism in general and Jouvin in particular, and thirst- 
ing to decoy him into some private Inquisition, there to tor- 
ture him on a private rack or burn him at a private stake. 
Where are the descendants (if any) of J. B. P. Jouvin ? Have 
they kept their father's name, and Faith, and trade, and do 
they yet ply the shuttle and weave the rich silks in gloomy 
Spitalfields? Uncertainty, uncertainty! There may be 
Jouvins yet, but they may have re-emigrated — degenerated — 
their very name may have become corrupted. One may be 
by this time an Irishman — say Father O'Jowler, consigning 
(in oratory) Protestants to torment, and on the little steps of 
his little altar fiercely denouncing the British Government, 
the Saxon race, and the theory of the earth's movement. 
One Jouvin may have emigrated to America, and in process 
of time transmuted himself into Colonel Gracchus Juvvins, 
that fierce pro-slavery Senator and (prior to his bankruptcy 
and ' absquatulation ' from the State of New York) ardent 
Free Soiler. There may be descendants of Jouvin in Eng- 
land, debased into Joggins, and, all unconscious that their 
ancestors were silk-weavers in Spitalfields, be keeping coal 
and potato-sheds in Whitechapel. 

Where on earth are the people who send conscience-money 
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer? Did you ever per- 
sonally know any one who so sent cash or halves of bank 
notes to Downing Street? Who takes the conscience-money 
in — the hall-porter, a money-taking clerk specially appointed 
for the purpose ? Does the hall-porter wink ? does the clerk 
lay his finger to his nose as the conscientious anonymous 
thrusts the precious envelope into their hand, and rushes 
through the rubbish into Fludyer Street — or is the con- 
science-money all sent by post? Can you point out to me 
one single gentleman with a white waistcoat, a broad-brimmed 
hat, and a watch and seals, and say — ■ There goes T. J., or 
L. B., who sent the Chancellor of the Exchequer fifty pounds 
yesterday on account of taxes unpaid?' Yet these men 
making restitution must be somewhere or other. What are 
they like ? I have a fanciful theory — founded on what basis 
I am, I confess, quite at a loss to tell — that the majority of 
these men troubled with a conscience are men with white 
waistcoats, broad-brimmed hats, watches and seals ; further- 



WHERE ARE THEY? 395 

more, that they all wear low shoes, and take snuff from mas- 
sive golden boxes. They are all immensely rich, of course ; 
and the conscience-dockets in their cheque-books are mingled 
with numerous others relating to donations to charitable 
institutions, police-court poor-boxes, and cases of real distress. 
I can fancy the entries in their diaries running somewhat 
thus : ' Attended board-meeting of orphan sympathisers at 
noon ; relieved the destitute at half-past twelve ; gave away 
soup-tickets at one ; flannels and coals at two ; drew cheque 
for fifty pounds, and enclosed it to the Chancellor of the 
Exchequer as conscience-money at three.' I wonder how 
long after they have defrauded the revenue to any consider- 
able extent their conscience begins to prick them, and how 
long they battle with conscience, and hocuss him, and 
smother him, and refuse to listen to his still small voice. I 
wonder when it is they are at last persuaded to make restitu- 
tion, and how they do it — whether with the ineffable felicity 
of well-doing, or with the uneasy satisfaction of atoning by a 
partial disgorgement for a grievous roguery, or with the 
tremour of detection, or the sullenness of self-reproach, or 
the horror of despair. Are the conscience-money senders, 
after all, not the white-waistcoated, low-shoed men I have 
figured to myself, but hard, stern, gaunt, grisly lawyers, 
bill-discounters, bailiffs to great landlords, speculators, guar- 
dians, committee men, trustees, and the like? Are they 
suddenly overtaken with such a sharp and quick remorse for 
the injuries they have inflicted on those over whom they have 
power, or who have trusted in them, for the widows they 
have been hard upon, and the orphans whose noses they have 
ground, that in sheer tremour and agony of mind they with 
their trembling hands adjust the salves of gold and plasters 
of bank-notes to the hidden sores of their hearts, and in a 
desperate hurry send tens and twenties and fifties all over the 
country ; this to the widows' almshouse and this to the 
orphan's asylum; this to the water company for unpaid 
water-rate ; this to the gas company for the falsified meter ; 
this to the railway company for having travelled in first-class 
carriages with second-class tickets, or exceeded the allowed 
quantity of luggage, or smoked in defiance of the bye-laws ; 
this to the Exchequer in part compensation of the abused 
commissioners and defrauded collectors of income-tax? 
Whether I am at all right or all wrong in these sunnisings, 
I imagine the payments of conscience-money are generally 



396 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

payments on account — on very small account — of the sums 
due to individuals or to Government. I think if I had ten 
thousand a year, and a great many shares in a great many 
mines and railways, all purchased at a considerable discount, 
and all quoted, now, at a considerable premium ; if I had a 
large house and many servants, and my aunt in Somerset- 
shire had disinherited my disreputable brother Bob in my 
favour ; if my brother Ned's children (he failed, poor fellow, 
shortly after I retired from the firm) were in a charity-school, 
and Ned's widow (her dowry started us in business) taking in 
needlework,— if my last little ventures in slaves in Cuba, and 
Brummagen guns in Caffraria, and bowie-knives in Arkansas, 
and rum, brandy, and abdominous idols on the Guinea coast 
had all been very successful, — I think, now and then, when I 
had begun to think that I was getting old, and that I had 
been a hard man, or that I had the gout, or a fit of indiges- 
tion, or the blues, — that I could send the halves of a few 
notes to the Chancellor of the Exchequer as conscience- 
money : — reading the announcement of the enclosure in the 
next morning's ' Times ' would help down my tea and toast 
a little. I think, too, that I should like to see my name in a 
few subscribers' lists, and committee lists, and stewards for 
public dinner lists. 

Where are 'the people who advertise children's cauls for 
sale ? And where, more difficult to find still, are the people 
who buy them — ay, and give ten guineas for them ? It has 
occurred to me, sometimes, wandering through London, to 
lose my way, and in some unknown street in some little 
known neighbourhood to come suddenly upon a dingy shop, 
in the window of which was the announcement : * A child's 
caul to be sold here.' But I never had courage to enter. I 
never had courage to ask to inspect the weird article, possess- 
ing, according to popular superstition, more occultly nautical 
powers than the famed egg-shells in which, unless broken 
by the cautious egg-spoon at the morning breakfast-table, the 
unholy witches sail about in yachting expeditions on their 
hideous sabbath. I had never the courage to wait till the 
unknown customer with the ten guineas arrived. He does 
arrive, I believe, to this day; but where he is I know not, 
neither where are the cauls or the children that are born 
with them. I wasn't born with a caul. The places where- 
they are on sale are published in the advertisement, but don't 
believe that the original proprietors of the cauls come from 



WHERE ARE THEY? 397 

or live there. The only place where I could imagine a 
child's caul to he indigenous, would he at a herbalist's, than 
which, with the solitary exception of a ladies' second-hand 
warehouse, I do not know a more mysterious and cloudy 
establishment. 

There are two classes who, though their whereabouts is 
wrapped in much mystery, I am not very curious about. 
These are the writers of the cypher or puzzle advertisements, 
commencing somewhat in this style : — 

' Fxm5obtlmztyivk6oZithlilio8tmqgllpTT55gglolYi9.' I 

And secondly, the monogrammatical advertisers : — the * Pick- 
ackifaxes,' - Boot-jacks,' ' No hearth-rug,' 4 How about X. ?' 
and gentlemen adopting that style of literature. I don't 
think that much good would result to us or to anybody if 
we knew where those worthies were. Besides, they, and the 
makers of appointments, and the sayers of soft sayings and 
the talkers of drivelling nonsense in a newspaper, with forty 
thousand subscribers, and goodness knows how many million 
readers, enter into the category I mean to descant upon some 
of these days when I ask, Where are the Donkeys that are 
not on Hampstead Heath, Brighton Cliff, Smithfield Monday 
Market — not in costermongers' shallow broom -carts, or the 
Pound? 

Where are all the c perpetual commissioners for witnessing 
the deeds to be executed by married women ?' The Lord 
Chancellor is as perpetually appointing them ; they have all 
curious names and addresses ; but where are they ? I never 
saw a perpetual commissioner ; I never knew a married 
woman who was doomed to go through the awful ordeal of 
executing a deed and having it witnessed by one of Jihese 
dread beings. Are they perpetually sitting, these commis- 
sioners? Do they never leave off witnessing the deeds I 
never saw? There is one Hugh Harmer Hollowpenny, 
dwelling at Bettwys-y-boyd, in Wales. Fancy a commis- 
missioner having to sit perpetually at Bettwys-y-boyd, to 
witness the execution of the deeds never, under any circum- 
stances whatever, executed by the married women of that ilk ! 

Where are three-fourths of the barristers who are called to 
the bar ? Do they practise ; do they earn anything ; does any- 
body ever see anything of them ? Are they born barristers of 
seven years' standing : or how do they like standing so long ? 

The gentlemen who have commissions signed by the Lord- 



398 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

Lieutenant, where are they? Where is the Court of Lien- 
tenancy of London, and who belongs to it? I have seen 
a deputy-lieutenant at a levee, but I want to' know where 
he is when he is at home ; what he is lieutenant over, and 
why, and all about it ? 

I don't care where the dissolute Initials are. My private 
opinion is, that, if they are foolish enough to run away from 
home, their parents are well rid of them. I have more 
curiosity to know where the people are who are to call in 
Bedford Eow or Southampton Buildings, or Lincoln's Inn, 
in order that they may hear something to their advantage. 
I wonder what it is ! My curiosity is checked by the know- 
ledge that it will not be by any means to my advantage to 
find out; yet selfishness notwithstanding, I can't give up 
reading this portion of the ' Times ' every morning, lest there 
should be by chance a stray notice hinting that a call on my 
part somewhere in the neighbourhood of the inns of court 
would be advantageous to me, or that there are some odd 
thousands of unclaimed stock or hundreds of unclaimed 
dividends standing in my name in the books of the Bank 
of England. 

Where are the cases of real distress,— the people who write 
the appeals to the benevolent, — the daughters of beneficed 
clergymen, — the widows of distinguished officers ? I should 
like to know how many of these cases are indeed in real dis- 
tress, and how many are as near as first cousins to the honour- 
able society of begging-letter writers. 

Where are the ' Lord Mayor's swordbearer's young man, 7 
and the ' Lord Mayor's trumpeter's young man, 5 and the 
4 water-bailiff's young man,' when not officially engaged, and 
what # are they like when not officially clothed? I wonder 
whether I ever dined at Greenwich with the water-bailiff's 
young man. Where are the yeomen of the guard, and the- 
marshalmen, and the sergeant trumpeters, and the pursuivants- 
at-arms, when there are no coronation or marriage processions, 
no openings of the House, no state visits to the Opera. Do 
they wear in private life those resplendent crimson and gold 
doublets, those symmetrical trunk hose, those historical but 
hideous little hats with the red and white roses ?* W'bere are 

* Of even this costume, as worn at least by the Tower Yeomen, the ques- 
tion may now be asked ' Where is it?' Time edax rerum has shouldered 
the doublet from Tower Hill, and the Beefeaters' dress will soon be 
reckoned altogether, I fear, among 'Things departed.' 



"WHERE ARE THEY? 399 

they ? TV here are the innumerable mourning-coaches in long 
clothes "that followed the Duke of Wellington's funeral ? If 
there were another state funeral, would they come out again? 

TThere are all the thousands of Ladies of Glasgow, Abstain- 
ers of Lambeth, and Members of the Primitive Church of Ber- 
mondsey, who sign their so many thousand names to petitions 
for the redress of almost every imaginable worldly grievance, 
laid on the tables of the Houses of Parliament almost every 
night in the session ? TThere are the people who get up those 
petitions, and the people who write them ? And tell me, oh 
tell me more than all, where are those petitions themselves at 
this present time r 

TThere are they ? And who answers where ? And where, 
by-the-by, are all the echoes that have been perpetually an- 
swering where, ever since people began to make frothy 
speeches ? TThere, again, are the people who read frothy 
speeches when they are made and reported ? TThere are the 
' perhaps too partial friends ' who have persuaded so many 
authors to publish ? Did they know what they were at when 
they took those courses ? TThere are nine-tenths of the books 
so persuaded into existence ? Do the friends read them until 

they are all imbecile together ? TThere is the Blank, this 

who has been the subject of all those verses ? TV hat does 
Blank think of them ? Is he as tired of them as I am, or as 
you are of me ? 

Still, where are they? Where are, or is, that noun of 
multitude signifying many, the Public ? T\ hat sort of a 
public is it ? Is it the * enlightened British,' the ' impatient - 
of-taxation,' the ' generous, 5 the ' impartial,' the ' discrimina- 
ting/ the ' indignant,' the ' exacting,' the ' ungrateful ?' Have 
these publics any consanguinity with the ' many-headed mon- 
ster,' the 'mob,' the 'swinish multitude,' the 'masses, 5 the 
' populace. 5 the ' million? 5 Has this public anything to do with 
the Republic, and how much ? Is this the public which has 
so loud a Voice, and so strong an Opinion upon public topics, 
and a Public Service for the advantage of which all our states- 
men are so particularly anxious ? TThere is this highly- 
favoured, highly-privileged, much-cared-for, much belauded, 
much abused, always talked of, never seen public ? I observe 
that it is never present when it is the subject of a joke at the 
theatre ; which is always perceived to be a hit at some other 
public richly deserving it, and not present. Is the public com- 
posed of the two or three thousand weak-minded individuals 



400 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT, 

who take Billierson's Liver Pills, and Muley Moloch's Trea- 
sures of the Oasis, and Timour the Tartar's Medicated Cream ? 
Are the people who read the Eeverend Boanerges Bluderbuss's 
Wickedness of Washing proved by Prophecy the public ? Is 
it the public that believes in the Mission, and Divinity, and 
Angelic Nature of Thomas Towser, ex-shoemaker and prophet, 
who renounces cleanliness and predicts the speedy destruction 
of the world and the advent of the Millenium every Thursday 
and every Sunday throughout the year, at the east end of 
London ? 

I should like to be informed, if you have no objection, 
where are the rogues who put red lead into my cayenne pep- 
per, Venetian red, fuller's earth, and bad starch into my cocoa ; 
chicory, burnt beans, and chopped hay into my coffee ; Prus- 
sian blue, gummed and varnished sloe-leaves, emerald green, 
and bits of birch brooms in my tea ; chalk, water, calves' and 
horses' brains into my milk ; alum, gypsum, and dead men's 
bones into my bread ; sand and clay into my sugar ; cabbage- 
leaves, lettuce-leaves, hay, and brown paper into my tobacco 
and cigars ; glass into my snuff ; devil's dust, rotten thread, 
and evil odours into my clothes ; cotton into my silk handker- 
chiefs ; cast iron into my razors ; charcoal into my lead pen- 
cils ; bad brandy, sloe-juice, and logwood into my port wine ; 
turpentine, mastic, and water into my gin ; pyroligneous and 
oxalic acids into my pickle jar; ground sealing-wax and 
pounded sprats into my anchovy sauce ; treacle, salt, cocculus 
indicus, and laudanum into my porter ; dogs, cats, and horses 
into my sausages ; and drowned puppies and kittens into my 
mutton pies. Where are they, the great tribe of Adulterators ? 
— the scoundrels who put villanous nastinesses into wholesome 
food ? Mr. Accum may have warned us that there is ' death 
in the pot ;' the ' Lancet ' may have sent forth its commissioners 
to analyse samples of teas and sugars ; a miscreant may be de- 
tected once in four years or so, filling up cases of preserved 
meat with the vilest offal, and neatly packing the interior of 
forage trusses of hay with shavings, stones, and dead lambs ; 
these hang-dogs — who have in their muderous frauds endea- 
voured to send out death and disease with the fleets and 
armies of England — may have their names gibbeted (in a quiet, 
gentlemanly manner) once or twice in a session during a lan- 
guid debate in the golden House of Lords ; — but where are 
they ? There is another public whose whereabout I am 
exceedingly anxious to find out, — the virtuously ' indignant ' 



WHEEE ARE THEY? 401 

public, — the public that applauds so vehemently in the gal- 
leries of criminal courts, — that * with difficulty are restrained 
from tearing to pieces ' notorious criminals, on their emerging 
from Bow Street after their examination and committal for 
trial. Now, nothing would please me so much as to introduce 
this public, the virtuous and indignant public, to the villanous 
and adulterating public ; and 'gin a public meet a public 
putting red lead into pepper, or sloe-leaves into tea, or offal 
into hay — and 'gin a public beat a public, and kick a public, 
and pelt a public, it seems to me that the two publics would be 
very appropriately brought together. 

Where are the people who ' go about saying things ?' I 
never go about saying things about other people ; yet other 
people are always going about saying things about me. They 
say (I merely adduce myself as an embodiment of Anybody) 
that I have a wife alive in Bermuda, and that I ill-treat the 
Mrs. Present Writer, alive and resident with me in England, 
dreadfully. They say I don't pay my rent, and that I have 
invested fifty-five thousand pounds in the French funds. 
They say that my plate is all pawned, and that bailiffs in 
livery wait at my table. They say that I am about to invade 
England with ninety thousand men next week; and that I 
was here, disguised as a Lascar crossing-sweeper, last Tues- 
day, reconnoitring. They say I have taken to drinking ; 
that I can't paint any more pictures ; that I have written 
myself out; that I lost four thousand pounds on the last 
Chester Cup ; that I have exercised a sinister influence over 
the foreign policy of the country, opened despatch-boxes, and 
tampered with despatches. They say I eat an ounce and a 
half of opium every day, and that Blims wrote my last 
pamphlet on Electoral Eeform. They say I am about to 
become lessee of Her Majesty's Theatre ; that I set my house 
on fire ten years ago ; that I am the ' Septimus Brown ' who 
was taken into custody in the last gambling-house razzia ; 
that I have shares in the Turkish loan, and the Eussian rail- 
ways ; that I have presented a gold snuff-box to the ex-beadle 
of St. Clement Danes ; that I murdered my aunt, my cousin, 
and my brother-in-law years before the commission of the 
crime for which I am now condemned to death ; that I am an 
atheist; that I am a Jesuit; that my father was hanged; that 
I am illicitly related to royalty; that I am to be the new 
governor of Yellow Jack Island ; and that I cut Thistlewood's 
head off. Now, where are the people who say all these things 

2 D 



402 GASLIGHT AND DAYLIGHT. 

about rae, about you, about kings, queens, princes, and 
chandlers' -shop keepers ? You don't ' go about ' saying such 
things ; / don't go about saying them ; yet somebody goes 
about saying them. Where is your somebody and my some- 
body ? Where are they ? 

Where are the Parties in the City to whom your money- 
lender is always obliged to apply to obtain the money he 
lends you ? Where is the party who does not like the last 
name on the bill, and would prefer an additional name? 
Where is the Other Party, the only implacable party, who 
won't hear of any delay in your being sued, sold up, and 
arrested ? Where is the Third Party, who is always obliged to 
be consulted, ' squared,' spoken to ; who always holds the 
bill, and won't give it up ; who was so unfortunately present 
when your friend wished to mention that little matter pri- 
vately to the other party, and who consequently prevented 
its satisfactory adjustment? Where is he ? I ask again, 
where is he ? Where are they ? Everybody ! 

Where is the ' gentleman ' who has called for us during our 
absence from home ; but who returns no more than the hat, 
umbrella, and thermometer which he is supposed to have 
taken from the entrance hall ? Where is the gentleman for 
whom the silk-lined overcoat, or the patent leather boots were 
made, but whom they did not fit ; which is the sole reason of 
their being offered to us at so reduced a rate ? Where is that 
unflinching friend of the auctioneer, the gentleman who has 
such a number and such a variety of articles of property — 
from ready-furnished freehold shooting boxes, to copies of 
Luther's Bible — and who is always going abroad, or is lately 
deceased ? Where is the lady who is always relinquishing 
housekeeping, and is so strenuously anxious to recommend 
her late cook or housekeeper? Whereabouts, I wonder, are 
the two pounds per week which can with facility be realised 
by painting on papier-mache, or by ornamental leather- work ? 
or by the accomplishment easy of acquirement and ' connected 
with the Crystal Palace ?' Where is the fortune that is so 
liberally offered for five shillings? Where are the smart 
young men who want a hat? Where are all the bad writers 
whom the professors of penmanship in six lessons are so 
anxious to improve? Where are the fifty thousand cures 
warranted to have been effected by De Pompadour's Flour of 
Haricoes ? Where are all the wonderfully afflicted people 
who suffered such excruciating agonies for several years, and 



WHERE AEE THEY? 403 

were at last relieved and cured by two boxes of the pills, or 
two bottles of the mixture ; and who order, in a postscript, 
four dozen of each to be sent to them immediaiely, for which 
they enclose postage stamps? Where are the gentlemen of 
good education, who offer five hundred thanks for Government 
appointments, legally transferable? Where are the other 
gentlemen who have the Government appointments, and do 
transfer them legally, and accept the thanks, and keep the 
inviolable secrecy which is always to be observed, and where, 
Where, I say, are the Government appointments which are 
' legally transferable ' ? 

Where are the First-Bate Men, the Eich City Men, the 
Twenty Thousand Pound Men, who are sure to ' come into ' 
every new project the moment it is fairly launched ? Where 
are the buyers of all those eligible investments — the partakers 
(for five hundred pounds down) in fortune-making patents for 
articles in universal demand? "Whereabouts in the daily, 
evening, or weekly papers, am I to find the enthusiastically 
laudatory criticisms of new novels (such as ' A delightful 
work.' — Times. i The best novel of the day.' — Chronicle. 'An 
admirable book.' — Examiner.- ' Worthy of Fielding. ' — Globe) 
appended to the booksellers' advertisements ? Where are the 
purchasers of the cerulean neck-ties with crimson and gold 
bars, the death's-head shirts, the pea-green gloves that we see 
displayed in hosiers' shops ? Where are the libraries which 
would be incomplete without nearly all the new books criti- 
cised in the weekly papers ? — and which, of course, have got 
them? Where are those hereditary bondsmen, who to free 
themselves must strike the blow; where is the blow to be 
struck, and how are the bondsmen to strike it ? 

One question more, and I have done. Where are all the 
people whom we are to know some of these days ? Where is 
the dear friend to whom, ten years hence, we shall recount 
what an atrocious villain our dear friend of to-day turned out 
to be ? Where are they all hidden — the new connections we 
shall form, quite forgetting our m present ties of blood and 
friendship ? Where are the wives unknown, uncourted yet ; 
the children unborn, unthought of, who are to delight or 
grieve us ? Where are the after-years that may come, and 
where is all that they may, and all that we already know they 
must, bring ? 

THE END. 






LONDON: 

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AND CHARING CROSS. 



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